With COVID-19 (Coronavirus) on the rise, companies are increasingly shutting their office doors, and asking employees to work from home. This kind of seismic shift of an entire company’s work environment is a huge, complex task. It requires not only loyalty, self-discipline and maturity on the part of employees, but also available, secure, high-performing tools for remote work on the technical side.
Security, in this case, is the most important part. As a company opens itself up to new, remote home office connections, maintaining and keeping track of who has access to company systems is crucial. After all, CISOs have no control over an employee’s home office environment. This is a huge threat for any organization.
The good news is that transitioning to a proper remote access environment can be quick and painless, if done correctly.To establish a fully secure, easy to use and efficient remote access network one needs only three tools:
- Virtual Private Network (VPN)
Widely used tools handling the secure transmission between a company network and remote users’ computers. VPNs granting access to the specific part of the enterprise’s network usually offer easy-to-use access gateways (websites), which are crucial from non-technical users’ perspective.
Most large businesses already have VPNs. The question is whether a business’ existing setup can scale to meet a much heavier load.
- Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA)
MFA systems are well known and widely used. Their job is to handle user authentication, using one of a full range of methods. For example, one-time codes can be sent as simple text messages to a cell phone, or as alerts through mobile apps. Old-fashioned hardware tokens, FIDO tokens, and sophisticated biometric technology can also get the job done.
TIP: If time is short, the best option is to adopt mobile-oriented method MFAs. They’re much easier to organize and deploy and, for employees, much simpler to use and understand.
- Privileged Access Monitoring (PAM)
For maximum security, companies should monitor and record all network activity. Remote workers connect from many different locations that CISOs have no control of. Computers can be taken over, sessions can be compromised, identities can be stolen. All these factors mean that the probability of a corporate breach is much higher when business equipment connects with home-office computers.
PAM tools offer user login management, session recording and monitoring and deep packet analysis that allows network operators to see what connected users are doing. The most cutting-edge PAMs include biometric-based detection that track mouse movements and alert operators to anomalous network activity.
TIP: Fudo’s PAM solution goes beyond password vault and AI-powered session management by offering an easy-to-use access gateway with MFA and an efficiency analyzer. Access gateways paired with MFA can be used instead of VPNs, and an efficiency analyzer is a smart tool for flagging idle sessions.
It’s important that we all do our best to stay safe from viruses both biological and digital. The first step towards avoiding COVID-19 is to work from home, until health officials say it’s okay to return to the office. The first step towards avoiding data breaches is to deploy a secure, efficient privileged access manager to your company’s network.
