Protecting Your Distributed Teams: A Cybersecurity Guide for Leaders

The massive shift to remote and hybrid work that began in 2020 shows no signs of slowing down. As of late 2022, over 60% of full-time employees were still working from home all or part of the time. While the flexibility of distributed work comes with many benefits, it also introduces new cybersecurity risks that technology leaders need to understand and get ahead of.

In this guide, we'll cover key considerations and best practices cybersecurity executives, managers, and architects should implement to secure their remote and hybrid teams in the new normal of work.

Understand the Risk Landscape

Cybercriminals aggressively target remote workers to gain a foothold into corporate systems and data. Without the endpoint and network protections afforded on premises, home networks present tempting attack vectors. Threat actors also recognize that employees working outside the office may be more vulnerable to social engineering attempts andPhersoning campaigns—and they are ramping up these intrusion efforts.

As cybersecurity leaders, we need to comprehend this escalated risk environment created by a mobile workforce. Some key threats distributed teams face include:

• Unsecured home Wi-Fi connections: These present an open door for attackers to snoop on network activity or spread malware.
• Communication platforms: Chat apps, video conferencing tools, and other SaaS products used by remote teams introduce risks if not properly configured and secured.
• Lack of device safeguards: Personnel devices used for work may lack endpoint security controls like antivirus software and encryption.
• Increased phishing campaigns: Attackers recognize remote personnel are primed targets for socially engineered cyber intrusions.

Mitigate Risk Through Zero Trust

Zero trust has become the new cybersecurity paradigm for the remote work landscape. Instead of assuming trusted access at the perimeter, zero trust mandates identity verification and least-privilege for every access attempt.

Here are critical zero trust layers leaders should implement for distributed teams:

• Enforce MFA everywhere: Require multi-factor authentication (MFA) for all corporate application and resource access to prevent stolen credentials-based attacks.
• Secure access: Employ zero trust network access (ZTNA) tools that dynamically authenticate remote personnel and check device health before enabling application access.
• Encrypt data: Protect sensitive data via encryption, tokenization, or other obfuscation techniques and tightly control access to keys.

Boost Cyber Resilience Through Education

With distributed personnel outside the corporate firewall, human-centered defenses become even more essential. An aware, informed workforce provides a resilient final barrier if cyber intrusions do occur.

Leaders need to prioritize cybersecurity awareness building for remote teams via methods like:

• Security newsletters with advice for working securely from home.
• Phishing simulations to help personnel identify and report potential email-based attacks.
• Required security awareness modules focused on distributed personnel risks.

Closely Monitor for Compromise

As cyber risk mounts for mobile teams, leaders should pursue tools and tactics to quickly detect potential intrusions that evade preventive systems. Important visibility and monitoring capabilities include:

• Endpoint detection and response (EDR) tools that track anomalies on remote devices.
• Increased logging from SaaS apps and cloud services used by distributed teams.
• Security information and event management (SIEM) technology to correlate findings across systems and identify concerns.

Prepare Incident Response for Remote Containment

Despite superior cyberdefenses, some intrusions will still occur. Security leaders must update incident response plans for the distributed environment to enable rapid isolation and remediation of threats.

Key considerations for mobile-optimized response include:

• Remote device isolation: Protocols to immediately restrict compromised endpoints from corporate resources until threats can be neutralized.
• Secure remote forensic analysis: Tools to allow analysts to derive learnings from breached mobile devices in read-only mode without bringing them on premises.
• Personnel training for self-remediation: Documentation and resources to guide affected staff through basic threat containment steps if corporate help is not immediately available.

The Way Forward

As remote and hybrid distributed teams become a standard operating model for enterprises, cybersecurity leaders need to accordingly reshape their defenses, asset protection, resilience readiness, and incident response for this new epoch of work. Through a sharp understanding of the specific risks faced by your mobile workforce combined with a zero trust architecture augmented by advanced endpoint and analytics solutions, CISOs can empower secure productivity for personnel wherever they choose to work.

Sennovate Provides Innovative Solutions for the Remote Work Landscape

At Sennovate, we offer a next-gen zero trust platform architected specifically for the work-from-anywhere world. We help cybersecurity leaders like you enable secure access, implement least-privilege controls, defend SaaS applications, encrypt sensitive data, detect advanced threats, and respond rapidly to intrusions – no matter where your users are logging in from.

Learn more about protecting your distributed workforce with Sennovate by scheduling a call with our experts. Our team of experts stands ready to answer your questions and show you intelligent new approaches to securing your mobile teams.

Let’s connect to explore what Sennovate can do for your organization’s cyber-readiness in the new work paradigm.