Cognitive based ‘Sentinel Solutions’ to help organizations secure next-gen work from home environment

With the emergence of the COVID-19 crisis, Work from Home (WFH) has become the new normal. Thanks to technological advances like cloud computing, instant messengers and video conferencing tools, workers in many sectors were able to work remotely on a daily basis, with minimal hiccups. Adopting mass WFH as a future BCP strategy or an interim adjustment comes with certain security risks, especially for those businesses that involve transactions of highly confidential and sensitive data. The businesses, their clients and the information security officers are rapidly looking for solutions that can enable the security of sensitive information when employees work from home.

Changing times & Challenging Situations

Sutherland deals with various Banking, Finance, and Healthcare clients, and all these sectors fall under the confidential information transaction category. How can an organization ensure that data privacy and security concerns are addressed in the WFH scenario? How can an enterprise ensure clients are guaranteed that customer data and confidentiality is kept secure in all work environments? With these questions in mind, we developed Sutherland Sentinel suite of solutions - a framework with various products to cater to Realtime Monitoring, Data/PII masking, Apps Monitoring and Secure Payment Gateway.

Birth of Sentinel Solutions

Sutherland has implemented Sentinel Vision for customers who wish to add an added layer of security in the work at home environment. A non-intrusive automated solution that resides in the consultant’s computer, working in the background to capture images of the user during frequent intervals. It also captures screenshots of the employee’s screen to ensure that they are on productive applications. This has enabled us provide reliability, accountability and adherence to work-at-home policies and compliance metrics to our client(s). The solution enables managers monitor the security of each employee’s environment, without interrupting their work. Its non-intrusive user interface has made tracking a seamless process. The employee can continue to work like a regular office day. The photograph that is captured during a one-time registration process is sent to the supervisor for approval. Once the approval is done Sutherland Sentinel starts working strictly in the background, uploading the photographs from the agent desktop to the monitoring environment where the supervisor or the client can monitor the employee at regular intervals.

Simplistic yet effective monitoring capability

To make it more efficient, we introduced a gallery view to monitor all the agents at one glance. If any employee has obstructed the view of the camera, the Sentinel solution intelligently moves those users to a red zone and alerts the supervisor. Sutherland sentinel is also feature packed with cognitive features such as face detection, face matching, user count and the like. It also detects and alerts if there is an intruder who is gazing at the computer screen. The solution also ensures that each photograph that is being clicked is light weight to ensure the storage of these photograph is not a burden on the cost and the image travel from the consultant computer to the web monitoring environment happens real-time.

Use of facial & image recognition for anomaly detection

One of our clients, a leading integrated healthcare network deals with critical customer information such as credit card number, SSN number, email address, phone number and other PII information. As a regular protocol, employees are not allowed to carry mobile phones, tabs, pens and paper in the production environment. The client wanted assurance in being able to ensure the same level of compliance during work from home. For this, we invoked the feature in Sentinel Vision that intelligently detects if there are any anomalies. Anomalies include any device capable of taking inputs like a mobile phone or a laptop or a tab, including pen, paper, digital note pads.  Should there be any anomalies found within the user environment, Sentinel flags it to the supervisor immediately.

Another major ask from multiple clients is of cyber security - data breaches, data misuse and data stealing avoidance. To take care of this, the Sentinel Data masking feature encrypts the data on the user interface and at the point of ingestion. Managers and administrators can selectively mask fields such as those containing personally identifiable information so that the analysts who investigate security alerts do so without identifying the data of the investigation. There is a fine grained role-based access control (RBAC), special privileges or limitations that can be assigned to special interest groups such as clients, managers or an infosec group to unlock selective fields, hence providing a control over what needs to be displayed on the tools. In the event that a user account is flagged for unusual activity, Sentinel has the capability to notify the flagged individual and his or her managers where there is a likely compromise on security. The Data Masking feature has helped us keep up the security and compliance metrics with all of our clients.

With the client data secured, employee privacy is also of utmost concern for Sutherland. Domestic laws vary from country to country, challenging an organization to find the right balance between deploying effective monitoring tools and providing proper privacy controls. Sentinel suite of solutions ensures that the user environment privacy is not compromised. The room scan algorithm creatively ensures that the user background is made completely obscure and focuses only on the faces and materials near the user.

The new normal

One thing about our unknown future is known, ‘Work from home’ is here to stay and companies needs to plan for threats, security, employee welfare and productivity management.

With Sutherland Sentinel, our clients realize complete security and accountability of the work being done. It is a non-intrusive and non-invasive tool for employees to continue their work and adhere to company policies, all without sacrificing their privacy. Sutherland Sentinel ensures business continuity with proper security in place to cater to continued and consistent customer experience in the new normal and always. Please reach out to me @ [email protected] or [email protected] to set up a demo.