As soon as the dust settled from the initial push to move everyone out of traditional offices, IT teams – and specifically security teams – had little chance to catch their collective breath. The challenges surrounding remote-work security are demanding new solutions to support a robust digital defense.
New tools are available, while others will soon hit the market. They are designed to improve cloud security and how remote workers interact with enterprise assets. There are a few considerations that security teams should include as they evaluate their remote-work security strategies.
Hybrid Messes: With a hybrid work model keeping some employees in house and some remote, a hybrid IT infrastructure with a mix of both and a hybrid cloud model that adds public cloud solutions to private, enterprise IT has a bit of complexity to navigate.
The quick move to remote work created new opportunities for malicious actors, with some of the gap occurring because of a shift to cloud solutions and an increased reliance on them. This shift may have occurred in situations where there weren’t corresponding increases in budgets.
The result is an ad hoc approach to cloud migration, with a host of security vulnerabilities and a fuzzy concept of expected cloud outcomes.
In addition, large teams moving to remote work increased the enterprise attack surface, with employees moving to insecure locations and using insecure devices. Hackers recognize the opportunity to exploit these situations.
Grasping an Opportunity: The quick shift to remote work created new challenges, but it also presented a way to improve security and reduce costs by addressing complexity concerns. Enterprises can use tools like monitoring and analytics to quickly spot threats, but there are new tools available to improve remote-work security.
Cloud security posture management (CSPM) offers monitoring automation and even resolves some defense issues. It can perform tasks, such as identifying poor configurations or places where permissions require additional restrictions as well as spotting other potential vulnerabilities. It offers significant advantages for enterprises needing to closely follow compliance regulations, such as in health care or finance.
There are also new developments in firewalls that will be critical for cloud security, and particularly for remote teams. Web application firewalls (WAF) can be used for mobile apps, application programming interfaces (APIs), and other technology that may be vulnerable to distributed denial-of-service attacks or bots. The WAF watches for unusual activities, logs events, and alerts appropriate personnel when a threat is detected.
As firewall technology develops, artificial intelligence and machine learning will eliminate the risk of false positives and refine models to better predict whether an event could be malicious.
While it was impossible to anticipate that remote-work security would so suddenly become a priority for security teams, the increased security plane offers new opportunities for simplification of strategies. To learn more about developing a simplified, smarter cloud security approach, contact us at Cloud Source.