A key takeaway from the Covid-19 pandemic and lockdown is that millions of employees can successfully work from home; and international reports indicate that remote and hybrid work models are set to remain in place once it is safe for employees to return to offices.
By Doros Hadjizenonos, regional sales director: SADC at Fortinet
Statista believes that, in the US alone, the number of people working remotely could double permanently.
However, the Pew Research Centre has found that there are still challenges facing remote workforces, including meeting deadlines, dealing with interruptions and feeling motivated.
Even more worryingly, remote workforces also increase the security risks facing the organisation, with multiple devices and connections now spread over wider geographical areas.
These challenges present new opportunities for resellers to guide customers on strategies and solutions to make remote workforces more productive and secure as they settle into a future of remote work.
To help remote employees securely and efficiently complete their tasks, resellers should advise on more effective, integrated communications tools and workflows and secure shared workspaces.
It is also important to integrate security and networking to enable dynamic environments and continuous change without compromising security or reducing visibility.
A distributed network protected by isolated and inflexible security tools that can’t see or communicate with each other will inevitably experience security gaps and configuration issues.
A security fabric strategy, where security controls are seamlessly integrated with consolidated management and orchestration, reduces the overhead associated with telework security deployment. It also enables automated responses for faster and more effective threat resolution.
When building or updating network architectures, things like data privacy, integrity, and confidentiality need to be kept top of mind. And these values need to be applied across the network, not just for remote workers. That’s because business applications and workflows need to span from the endpoint to the core network to the company’s “distributed edge” in the cloud.
And securing this distributed environment requires cybersecurity solutions that are both integrated and automated.
Proper identity and access management controls should be implemented to ensure that remote employees do not access more files, systems or applications than they need to fulfill their responsibilities.
At the same time, outdated, poorly configured, or absent access management controls can also make it difficult for employees to access the applications they need to do their jobs and could hamper productivity, so roles should be clearly defined and kept up to date.
Single sign-on can reduce the difficulties associated with password fatigue by allowing employees to use one set of login credentials to access multiple business applications, but while SSO can also improve end-user experience, many organisations suffer from a single point of failure in their authentication systems.
To compensate for this potential weakness, partners should also implement multi-factor authentication (MFA) in conjunction with their customers’ SSO identity policies.
There are also opportunities for resellers to help customers align business processes such as finance and HR with best practices around communication privacy and authentication. These processes should also align with cultural processes that promote effective communication in an agile, trust-based environment.
Teleworking is probably here to stay, and with the new IT infrastructures required to facilitate this shift come new security implications, resellers must have the expertise to evaluate customer needs based on network configuration and be able to accurately position the tools needed to secure usage across distributed environments.