Guest blog: Tal Zamir, co-founder and CTO, Hysolate shares his views on the importance of cybersecurity when managing a remote workforce.
Vying for the remote control at home is on ongoing struggle to see who found it first and who is in control. On the corporate side, that wrangling is much more serious as IT departments and employees have to each secede some power to ensure productivity and safety.
With companies employing work-from-home policies due to the Coronavirus along with travel restrictions, quarantining, "social distancing" and other isolation techniques, the collaboration between company and employee is now at a critical juncture as organizations face technology and access pitfalls. The biggest challenge is for tech pros to secure endpoints that remote workers use to connect to the corporate network. It is these endpoints that will now come into the crosshairs for cybercriminals.
4 top secure work from home solutions:
One of the safest ways to ensure security of corporate data is to provide employees with locked-down laptops. However, it can lock down productivity as well. Companies have to consider what kind of data each employee has access in order to balance security and productivity.
Organizations can allow employees to use their personal laptops and desktops to directly connect to corporate applications and data through a secure VPN client. This gives employees more flexibility and allows greater productivity. The down side is that it can introduce a much larger threat landscape.
With two-factor authentication and more access controls implemented, IT can provide two other options. One is deploying a cloud-based, zero trust architecture that employees can access. The other is to allow users to connect from their personal devices through a Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI).
Employees are the front line of defense both at work and at home. Remote workers will have to be even more cautious about phishing emails that could compromise their devices as well as the corporate network. Cybercriminals will be sure to take advantage of the current environment. Another caution is network security. Home and public Wi-Fi networks are always a target and easily compromised.
Whether a portion of the corporate population works from home or a mass remote working environment, organizations also will need to give serious considerations to key requirements including scale, user productivity, security and manageability. It is a tightrope most organizations will have to manage for the months ahead.
About the author
Tal Zamir is founder and CTO of Hysolate. Tal is a 20-year software industry leader with a track record of solving urgent business challenges by reimagining how technology works. An entrepreneur at heart, he has pioneered multiple breakthrough cybersecurity and virtualization products. Before founding Hysolate, Tal incubated next-gen end-user computing products in the CTO office at VMware. Earlier, he was part of the leadership team at Wanova, a desktop virtualization startup acquired by VMware. Tal began his career in an elite IDF technology unit, leading mission-critical cybersecurity projects that won the prestigious Israeli Defense Award. He holds multiple US patents as well as an M.Sc. degree in Computer Science, and the nor of valedictorian from the Technion.