Background
Suraj is the corporate IT manager of XYZ Company. His primary responsibility is to deliver a secure and stable IT infrastructure for the company when employees work from home (WFH). Having worked as IT manager of XYZ for many years, Suraj realizes the importance of security, especially at these circumstances with so many employees requesting him to enable remote access to proprietary corporate applications such as CRM, ERP, HCM, etc…
Having worked with many stakeholders in the industry, Suraj is cautious with the threats in the InfoSec landscape. He realized the immense number of mobile apps seeking sweeping rights of the users’ mobile phone allows data leakage and worried about allowing the corporate application access to employees accessing via such vulnerable devices. To make concerns worst, he learned there could be many ways exploitation could occur from an unknown intruder.
Business Scenario
Then the management has asked Suraj to provide a plan to instill secure WFH environment for XYZ, he realized that the working context is no longer within the corporate network security perimeter and need to take extra cautious when the remote worker accessing resources from an unknown public end-point. While he was exploring secure WFH strategies with the help of his team, he reached out to professional at Dialog Enterprise to seek some expert thoughts. The outcome of the collaboration lead to many insight in to security when implementing WFH framework. Following are some of the leanings.
- Secure Access- VPN
Surfing the web or transacting on an unsecured Wi-Fi network means user could be exposing private information and browsing habits. With a virtual private network, better known as a VPN, should be a must for anyone concerned about online data security and privacy.
While the staff member connects to the corporate network via a remote connection, corporate must ensure the data pipe that talks to the corporate, is secured. Establishing A VPN connection provides an additional layer of security- hiding users IP, encryption during the data transit, masking the user’s location etc…
- OS and other security updates
The chances of breaking into vulnerable end-point devices are high if the OS version is not patched with recent versioning. User must make sure the device has complied with the latest version housekeeping security tools – virus guards, firewalls, device encryption etc…
- Creating a strong Password Policy
A strong password policy is the front line of defense to confidential user information.
Maintaining a stringent password policy includes the time window of an active password, Two-factor authentication, password policy scheme etc..
Setting up a common or generic password (PASSWORD123) is strictly avoided and again this is something closely related to the nurtured InfoSec culture within the corporate.
- Encourage the secured Cloud services
Suraj realized that Cloud tools will ultimately help to mitigate security threats and when facing any potential scaling necessity. With cloud tools, companies like XYZ can gain seamless integration for applications across many parts of the organization and offer robust security and data storage.
The premise here is to avoid storing corporate-owned resources locally at end-points. This entails challenges in isolating corporate information from personal.
- UEM- Unified End-point Management
The core function of UEM is, it mitigates corporate information bleeding. Making a single dashboard to deploy and manage policies and configurations. The enforcement process can be done over-the-air and thus even the devices that are out in the field can make them complied without bringing the device to the HQ.
One of the core principle Jeff realized was the importance of instilling a culture that fosters good practices of information security. He strongly believes no strategy will work unless every member of the organization understands and support the cause. Along with this thought, he truly believes technology tools is the other part of the equation.
While Suraj’s effort to implement these suggestions, he met professionals at Dialog Enterprise to share his view. As a leading technology enabler, with many suites of security solutions Dialog Enterprise closely worked with Suraj to implement his plan to roll-out a secure WFH framework for XYZ.
At these precautious times for corporate IT managers like Suraj, gliding the network functions smoothly is rather a framework of meticulously executed activities. At Dialog Enterprise closely work with domain experts to help to execute WFH strategies with added network and end-point security.