The Road to Working Remotely and Securely
- lpeter65
- Oct 1, 2020
- 4 min read
Working remotely poses challenges. When the business world moved almost the entirety of operations and employees home earlier this year, cybersecurity experts like me found it both exciting and somewhat terrifying. It was certainly an opportunity for those of us in the cybersecurity sector to demonstrate how we can help. But the potential for a second pandemic – one consisting of the exploitation of vulnerable systems and data by bad actors – kept a lot of us up nights wondering how we could keep industry safe.
Like me, most cybersecurity professionals knew that, for any number of reasons, some organizations were inevitably going to dismiss or underplay the threats posed from moving operations offsite. Warnings of insufficient firewalls, susceptible networks and lackluster end point protection software sometimes fell on deaf ears. Many decision makers were either naïve about the scope and scale of threats posed by the home office or they anticipated a short-term situation rather than the long-haul we find ourselves in now. So, some businesses did not jump on board with advanced Work from Home (WFH) cybersecurity protocols essential to the safety of their data, operations and even their accounting and finances.
It will be interesting in a few years, when all is said and done, to analyze the ROI that enhanced cybersecurity measures during the pandemic afforded proactive organizations (compared to those who dragged their cybersecurity feet). Time will certainly tell.
In many ways, the pandemic merely expedited and expanded the slowly growing trend of employing a remote workforce. When you think about it, to some extent, the remote work paradigm started to take root in the 1970s with the overseas outsourcing revolution and global business expansion. So this entire remote operations paradigm – and the cybersecurity challenges it poses - has been a long time coming. COVID-19 just accelerated the inevitable.
While remote workforce and WFH security solutions are vast and incredibly customizable, they all mostly boil down to a few critical elements. Secure remote connectivity, end-point protection and critical visibility.
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