While the extent of remote working really depends on the individual company, but employers are expected to adapt and adopt quickly to allow their employees to work safely and remotely wherever possible.
Remote working brings with it the potential for cybersecurity threats, plus there are other concerns with employees working remotely. Equally important for employers is scalability and empowering their employees to continue working without limitations.
To gain an insight into some of these issues, Digital Journal caught up with Unisys Chief Trust Officer Tom Patterson.
Patterson offers the following advice: “Enabling work from home (WFH) in a secure fashion is a critical success factor for companies around the world that are focused on adapting to the new realities the pandemic has wrought.”
However, the analyst notes that: “Many companies are finding themselves stymied in shifting from less than 20 percent remote work to more than 90 percent overnight and are facing the scaling and security limitations of existing VPN infrastructures.”
By enforcing VPN access controls this will ensure only staff members who need to access certain resources are able to. It is also important for IT departments to proactively monitor traffic, as this enables security teams to quickly identify if anyone is attempting to exploit that access.
In terms of the solution, Patterson recommends putting measures in place to help “organizations around the world leverage zero trust methodologies and implement secure remote access to their existing infrastructure, is a fast growing component of our business, and a great way to help organizations around the world evolve to greater security and efficiency.”
In addition, organizations should be only activating application, data and role mapping to ensure users only access the resources they need. It is also important to enable mobile device security options to accommodate person device use. This activity ensures that devices are meeting corporate security policy and safeguarding sensitive data.
