Many businesses found themselves pivoting overnight to a remote workforce in response to the Covid-19 pandemic. Some businesses were unprepared. Other businesses were already transitioning employees to work remotely.
Regardless of whether a business is ready or not to accommodate their employees’ ability to work remotely, there are a number of challenges in creating a secure remote work environment.
Assessing the Security Risks of Your Remote Workforce Comprehensively
In some cases, the rapid change to remote work leaves holes in a business’s network. Especially, since evaluating the security risks of a remote workforce requires a business to shift its perspective. Meaning gauging a company’s security risk from the other end: the employee’s remote work environment.
One of the challenges is identifying whether or not employees working from home are using unsecured networks. If they are, then a business’s security risk is higher. Also, are employees using their devices such as tablets and personal computers to access the business’s network? Many personal devices and home computers aren’t setup with the right endpoint protection and the necessary security controls needed for remote work.
Not to mention, with more phishing scams and cyber-attacks targeting remote workers, businesses need cybersecurity strategies that look at the whole picture.
Calibrating Accessibility and Capacity Issues
The challenge of accommodating a sudden move to a remote workforce is ensuring your employees have access to the tools they need. Such as basic applications like video chat, email, file sharing and syncing and access to remote desktop IT support. This also means ensuring employees have the needed bandwidth. It’s a matter of calibrating existing employee accessibility and assessing a business’s bandwidth capacity.
Looking for the Right Virtual Private Network (VPN)
A Virtual Private Network (VPN) provides a secure end-to-end encrypted tunnel and greater privacy protections. With the pivot to working remotely, many CIOs, IT Managers and IT Departments find themselves looking for the right VPN solution.
Some businesses have a VPN with only a limited number of employees accessing it due to a non-scalable solution impacting their employees’ productivity and ability to work remotely.
Additionally, their network capacity may not be able to sustain the sudden increase in data traffic. Matching the right VPN solution to a business’s needs that accommodates their traffic requirements minimizes bottlenecks. Then there is the necessity of increased cybersecurity and proper VPN tech support to ensure a secure remote work setting.
Responding Quickly Needs a Holistic Cybersecurity Approach and Creative Tech Solutions
When the Stay-at-Home orders were announced, Clarity found businesses and organizations, in some cases, struggling to accommodate remote work. The challenge of pivoting to secure remote work raised the issues previously outlined.
Start with a Holistic Cybersecurity Approach
The immediate need was assessing cybersecurity risks and strategies comprehensively. Looking at both their network and their employees’ remote working environment. As well as assessing access and capacity issues. Plus, ensuring their VPN is the right technology solution. This requires a holistic cybersecurity approach.
This type of holistic approach is grounded in conducting a comprehensive security assessment of the entirety of a business’s remote work needs.
An Example of a Creative Tech Solution — Clarity’s Ready-Secure-Go™ VPN
Some clients needed an affordable secure VPN solution that matched their capacity needs, cybersecurity strategies and privacy requirements. But also, it needed to be quickly integrated into their network with very little onsite involvement. That’s how Clarity’s Ready-Secure-Go™ VPN technology solution came about.
Ready.
Clarity specifically developed our Ready-Secure-Go™ VPN which creatively combines both a hardware based and a software based VPN solution. While there is a cost for the VPN hardware, the deployment or set-up is included. Making it also affordable.
Secure.
Our Ready-Secure-Go™ VPN is secure. Clarity’s cybersecurity specialists ensure it’s setup to meet security and encryption needs.
Go.
When Clarity’s Ready-Secure-Go™ VPN solution arrives, it’s ready to go. Simply plug it into the business’s or organization’s existing infrastructure.
As the Covid-19 pandemic continues to test businesses and organizations, meeting the challenge of setting up a secure remote workforce should be clearer. Taking a holistic cybersecurity approach and adding creative solutions helps. Right now, that’s what is needed— helpful technology solutions.
Author Snippet:
Raff Bisceglia is a Partner and Head of Technical Services and Cybersecurity at Clarity, a Canadian based data center and technology solutions company. With over 25 years experiences, Raff’s expertise ranges from managing network and systems deployment, change and capacity management, software development, network and server architecture, infrastructure design and implementation as well as cybersecurity. As Clarity’s Head of Technical Services and Cybersecurity, Raff leads the technical services and cybersecurity teams.