Pre-pandemic norms are a thing of the past as workers become more enamoured with the hybrid working model. No matter how much companies would like to believe the endemic phase will bring employees back to the offices, it simply isn’t true. A Fortinet article quoting Gartner stated, “Organisations are facing a hybrid future, with 75% of hybrid or remote knowledge workers saying their expectations for working flexibly have increased." With Covid-19 being the catalyst for more selective workers, one of the aspects of the so-called “Great Resignation” falls on the flexibility provided by the employers. Noticeably, while more companies are hiring, there is evidence that indicates employees today aren’t willing to compromise on the benefits.
Although there are a variety of reasons an organisation may want employees to return to the office surrounding productivity, control and cost, the reason that most workers overlook surrounds the subject of security. According to the FortiGuard Labs Threat Landscape report, ransomware has increased tenfold to target small and large enterprises alike. One of the main factors can be attributed to the remote working conditions most organisations were forced into at the start of the pandemic as attackers exploit unsuspecting remote workers.
While it may be easy to say enterprises should just invest in better security, the problem goes even deeper than that. If you are a person in a position to make the decisions regarding your organisation’s cybersecurity, you would understand that it isn’t simply about the technology. Most organisations with a hybrid workforce struggle with security challenges such as:
Budgeting
One major change that organisations will have to make to adapt to a more long-term work from anywhere model is the prioritisation of their IT spending. Pre-pandemic, enterprises mostly focused on securing their network as workers were confined to the office space with the occasional employee working out of the office but never for a long period of time. Now, the IT budget may have to be reallocated to more important investments for hybrid work such as cloud adoption, collaboration software, endpoint security and zero trust solutions across the many access points.
Shifting Security Infrastructures
Because workers aren’t confined to the office, an organisation’s attack surface has exponentially expanded, making the traditional castle-and-moat approach to cybersecurity no longer a viable choice. With the adoption of a zero trust approach, organisations have to invest in different types of security solutions such as network access control, endpoint protection and SASE, all the while ensuring they work together to protect the entirety of the network. Making protection of an organisation’s infrastructure inherently more complex.
Internal Threats
Time and time again, it has been reiterated that human error may be the most notorious enemy to the cybersecurity of an organisation. Phishing and ransomware attacks have been known to target employees to gain access to important enterprise data, which can only be remedied with adequate training and good cybersecurity hygiene. For employees that have access to the whole enterprise, it isn’t impossible for them to attack the organisation from the inside, which is why access control is so important. Another fact that IT teams should consider while protecting the organisation’s network is that remote workers aren’t working on secured home networks; therefore, without the right endpoint solution, businesses are vulnerable to VPN hijacking.
Cloud Security
Remote working requires employees to have access to company data and applications to be able to execute their jobs. This has led many companies to adopt cloud technology which comes with its own set of security problems. Organisations now have to ensure both network security and application performance are up to par which is where solutions such as SD-WAN and SASE come into the picture.
Having to add the many WFA security considerations to the already stacked issues that IT teams deal with on an everyday basis can be headache-inducing, especially if the security solutions organisations are employing aren’t integrated with one another. The ever-expanding networks that organisations have to constantly secure call for an integrated solution to cybersecurity because deploying siloed solutions make it impossible for responsible IT teams to track attacks and fend off intruders. This is why organisations should have a centralised orchestration and management framework to consistently apply critical WFA solutions.
But fear not! Fortinet unifies zero trust, endpoint, and network security to lead the work-from-anywhere era with the Fortinet Security Fabric. The Fortinet Security Fabric is a cybersecurity platform that spans the extended digital attack surface and cycle, and enables self-healing security and networking to protect devices, data and applications throughout your entire network infrastructure. Fortinet’s approach to security with the Security Fabric solution delivers a security solution similar to the Cybersecurity Mesh.
Built on three key attributes, the Fortinet Security Fabric is:
Broad – The Fortinet Security Fabric reduces the risk of managing an organisation’s entire digital attack surface through its broad portfolio.
Integrated – The Fortinet Security Fabric integrates all of an organisation’s security solutions to provide complete visibility across the entire infrastructure to close security gaps and reduce complexity.
Automated – The Fortinet Security Fabric is a self-healing network that leverages cloud-scale and AI to deliver coordinated protection across the Fabric for faster time to prevention and efficient operations.
Through the combination of these features in a single platform, Fortinet is enabling organisations to evolve safely to a new hybrid working model without the fear of unwanted intruders and unexpected attacks. For organisations looking for a way to simplify and improve the security of their WFA environments, an inclusive, integrated and future-proof solution like the Fortinet Security Fabric is a necessary investment.
To learn more about how the Fortinet Security Fabric works to secure your organisation, click here to head on over to their website.
0 Comment Log in or register to post comments