It is possible to stay more secure, resilient, and productive in hybrid way of working

A McKinsey survey?involving participants from different industries and geographies suggests that nine out of ten organizations will continue to operate in remote and on-site work models. Making employees productive is a continuous challenge and IT teams have been asked to solve this modern challenge. Most companies that had scrambled to connect employees using cloud services saw improved productivity. Is it sustainable and viable? And now that the workforce returns to offices, the aim is to sustain those productivity levels and leverage technologies to stay relevant in the market.

That said, ensuring business aligned cybersecurity has become an increasingly important element of enterprise IT architectures. Technologies implemented couple of years back may not be delivering the outcome to meet today's business needs. Many organizations have given employees the flexibility to work from anywhere on all or certain days of the week.

This flexibility, however, also places increased pressure on IT teams to ensure the security of business data, network, and resources. This is hyper-critical since the?first half of 2022?alone saw an 11% increase in malware attacks at 2.8 billion, ransomware volume that exceeded full-year totals of 2017, 2018, and 2019, and a 77% rise in IoT malware and a steep 132% increase in encrypted threats sent via HTTPS.

Why securing the enterprise is furthermore critical now?

While hybrid models’ success in work output and employee engagement is evident, companies need to take extraordinary measures. They must enhance their threat countering capabilities across all workplaces—remote or not. According to the?Identity Theft Resource Center’s 2021 Annual Data Breach Report, the number of data compromise incidents increased to 1603 in 2021, up from 1108 in 2020. The report also revealed that ransomware-related could be the top causes of data compromises in 2022.

While companies secure their office networks with firewalls, software patches, network monitoring, and other practices, not all of them can avert the sophisticated risks. We all know now cyber threat landscape is quite diverse today:

• Cybercriminals know the whereabouts of data and also know how to bypass the supporting security measures to launch the attack.
• The activities of hacktivists (hackers fighting for socio-political issues) amplify cyber threats.
• Less experienced hackers keep testing cyberattack attempts across enterprises to “improve their skills.”, creating lot of traffic noise

Improving cybersecurity for businesses is the need of the hour:

Organizations will need to re-assess their security measures to effectively counter threats that surround their hybrid work environment, ensuring that there are no weaknesses present anywhere in the digital eco-system. In this regard, the focus areas for businesses may be divided into three broad categories:

1. Begin with a security posture assessment to determine the new threat types that can target company's business operations.
2. Control access management systems and employee privileges carefully. Databases must be blocked for employees who have resigned or moved on to a role where they don’t need access to specific details.
3. Allocate a portion of the budget for?establishing a zero-trust?security architecture.
4. Onboard practices of regular employee connect to verify the security controls are working and effective - Digital security health program

In parallel, launch the Zero Trust Model (ZTM) that builds stronger resilience to prevent unauthorized access to an organization’s sensitive data and digital assets. The?Zero Trust?approach is also the most effective endpoint security response for workspaces impacted by new IoT devices and networked applications and records a continual increase in corporate users.

Companies are increasingly shifting their apps and data to the cloud. They would need future-ready monitoring capabilities and zero trust approach to optimize their workspace security and prevent damage from risks that traditional IT security tools cannot detect.

Secure Access Secure Edge (SASE) could be a logical next step in the ZTM process that brings advanced real-time threat detection capabilities with its custom-built security components, including Cloud Access Security Broker,?Zero Trust?Network Access, Secure Web Gateway, and Data Loss Protection. It enables the encryption of all ingress and egress data transactions.

Its architectural advantage enables businesses to reduce the threats no matter of your workforce types - office premises, dispersed branches, and remote locations.

With YASH Technologies’, we have leveraged SASE's capabilities and delivered ZTM with automated threat prevention strategies include:

• Virus-malware-spyware-ransomware protection
• Virtual firewalls, end-to-end encryption of all communications
• Vulnerability management
• Incident response management and sandboxing capabilities
• Data loss prevention capabilities
• Web application scanning,
• DDoS protection.

We can address the needs of telecom, government, BFSI, retail, e-commerce, healthcare, manufacturing, and energy and utility sectors, among others.

To learn more about the features and benefits of this digital security solution, write to us at?[email protected].

#Cybersecurity ##informationsecurity #digitaltransformation #ciso #securityawareness #securitysolutions