The sudden shift to remote work during the pandemic has created new cybersecurity challenges for many organizations. As an IT leader, it’s crucial to understand these challenges and implement solutions to secure your remote workforce. Here are the key aspects to focus on:
Challenges of Securing a Remote Workforce
Increased Attack Surface
With employees working from home, your organization’s attack surface has expanded significantly. Home networks and devices are often less secure than corporate networks and equipment. This increases vulnerabilities that hackers can exploit to breach your systems.
Difficulty Controlling Endpoints
When employees work remotely, it becomes much harder for IT teams to control and update the endpoints they are using. Lack of control over endpoints like laptops, smartphones, tablets and home computers is a major security risk.
Compliance Struggles
Many regulations require protection of sensitive data and PII. With remote workers handling such information on home devices and networks, it can be difficult to ensure compliance. This opens up risks of data breaches and non-compliance fines.
Limited Visibility
On-premises, IT teams can easily monitor endpoints, user activity and network traffic. With a remote workforce, visibility is lost leading to gaps in your security posture. Without visibility, you cannot detect threats and vulnerabilities.
Increasing Phishing Attempts
Hackers have capitalized on the pandemic with a significant increase in phishing emails and cyber attacks. Remote workers are more susceptible to these social engineering techniques when working outside the office. This can lead to compromised accounts, data breaches and malware infections.
Securing Your Remote Workforce
Update VPNs and Access Controls
Provide remote workers with VPN access to limit exposure of information. Authenticate users and limit access to only necessary applications and resources.
Enable Multi-Factor Authentication
Require multi-factor authentication (MFA) for all remote access and cloud applications. This adds an extra layer of security to ensure only authorized users can access accounts.
Secure Endpoints with EDR
Install endpoint detection and response (EDR) tools like CrowdStrike or SentinelOne on all remote devices. EDR provides visibility into endpoints and automatically detects and blocks threats.
Educate Employees on Phishing
Conduct security awareness training to educate employees on how to identify and avoid phishing attempts. Test them with simulated phishing emails to improve security behaviours.
Monitor User Activity
Deploy user activity monitoring tools to maintain visibility into actions undertaken by remote employees. This allows early detection of malicious activity or compromised credentials.
Manage Devices Centrally
Use a unified endpoint management (UEM) solution to configure devices, push updates, enforce compliance policies, and remotely wipe lost or stolen devices. This maintains control of remote endpoints.
Restrict Access and Data
Classify data and limit remote access to only what is essential for each users’ role. This reduces exposure of sensitive data like customer PII, financial information, product designs etc.
The shift to remote work has introduced new factors to consider in your security strategy. Assessing these challenges and implementing solutions like updated access controls, multi-factor authentication, EDR tools and user education enables securing your remote workforce against modern cyber threats. Adapting security policies for the new normal is key to empowering remote employees while protecting your organization’s systems and data.
