As more businesses turn to remote work, many are asking themselves, “What security issues come with working remotely?”
For most businesses, there are these top 4 security issues with working remotely:
Phishing scams
Unsecured endpoint devices
Home office risks
Network security
Whether you’re new to remote work or have been telecommuting for years, it’s important to understand how working from home affects your business’ cybersecurity. While certain cybersecurity protocols remain the same whether your office is virtual or not, other defenses need to be altered to fit the home office environment for all employees.
Learn what makes remote cybersecurity different, top security issues businesses face, and how your organization can protect itself below.
Regardless of whether workers are remote or not, all employees should understand their personal role in maintaining your business’ cybersecurity. It only takes one wrong click on a phishing email to cost your business hundreds of thousands—or even shut your doors for good.
If most or all of your employees work from home, the responsibility of each individual increases tenfold.
That’s because instead of maintaining cybersecurity standards across one office, standards must be maintained across as many offices as there are employees. Often, these security protocols must be upheld without the help of on-site IT support or management as well.
To achieve the best outcome, managers and IT teams should help teleworkers implement and practice proper cybersecurity whenever possible. Ultimately, however, much of it comes down to individual responsibility. When it comes to security issues with working remotely, teleworkers must understand how and why they contribute to their business’ overall cybersecurity.
Network security refers to the cybersafety measures taken to protect your company’s entire computer network. Your network security could include cloud computing, proactive cybersecurity tactics, segmentation, and more.
Your business may already be protecting its network with some of these or other cybersecurity strategies. If most or all of your employees are suddenly working from home, however, some of your company’s security measures may need to be rapidly revised.
For instance, if your company typically employs a user privilege system, those user authorizations might need to be updated now that workers aren’t in a shared office space. Or if your data is currently stored on external servers accessed through an internal network, you might attempt to move this data to a new storage location.
But changing how you protect your network can lead to unforeseen problems, new vulnerabilities, or security gaps. Under normal circumstances, such changes can be carefully planned, executed, and monitored. When circumstances dictate hasty change, however, your security could be at risk.
How to Protect Against Security Issues While Working Remotely
When it comes to mitigating or resolving the security issues of remote work, there is no one-size-fits-all approach. The exact cybersecurity measures your business needs will vary based on your organization’s size, operations, assets, and many other factors.
With that said, there are several best practices that can aid in improving remote cybersecurity for many different companies. Soffid is the solution to access information as your were in the office. Have a look to the following interesting video were our CTO, Gabriel Buades, tell us about how Soffid can secure your company data while teleworking.
Faced with a range of obstacles, businesses are changing how they approach cybersecurity
Cybersecurity has been a priority for business leaders for many years. Yet, despite investments in security controls, cyber-attacks keep coming.
Failing to meet regulatory compliance standards costs organizations billions every year. Even worse? The financial impacts continue to rise. These costs come from more than just fines and sanctions but actual damage to business disruption and loss of productivity. By taking a continuous approach to compliance requirements, your organization can dodge these monetary bullets and improve information security and data privacy.
Data protection compliance costs less than noncompliance
Smaller companies — with fewer than 5,000 employees — in particular may be hit hard by GDPR requirements and other data compliance hurdles. A new report does the math.
Research has shown that having a CISO can lower the cost of a data breach. But is there an effect on the cost of data protection compliance?
In many industries, the value of data is increasing, and so is the cost of protecting sensitive and confidential information. Regulatory scrutiny of information security is higher in industries such as financial services and healthcare, but that doesn’t mean other companies are off the hook.
Compliance, similar to a robust cybersecurity framework, is a key enabler of business and its absence instills heavy monetary impacts in the case of both on-premise and cloud deployment. What is the cost of compliance? Are organizations saving costs by remaining non-compliant? Understanding this is imperative in the world of modern business where cyberattacks continue to grow sophisticated.
Non-Compliance Cost And Its Repercussions
Several organizations had rationalized the non-compliance cost to be lesser than it is needed for bringing data and technology processes under compliance. However, the impact of non-compliance cost is jaw-dropping compared to the cost of compliance with regulations such as PCI-DSS, HIPAA, GDPR, and so on.
Recent years have seen high recommendations for compliance regulations to prevent legal implications, consequences regarding business reputation, and possible fines
It has been witnessed that the demand for audit evidence requests is increasing and organizations, one in six times, are found non-compliant. This has resulted in huge fines when screened by third-party auditors. The majority of organizations believe that compliance becomes a problem while moving systems, infrastructure, and applications to the cloud. They think that challenges come to the fore while dealing with IT security compliance in the cloud.
Often Overlooked Costs
The complete financial costs of a data breach can be hard to quantify. Tangible assets are the easiest piece of the puzzle, but consider other expenses such as lost future business and reputational damage. Intellectual property loss, downtime, and operational impacts affect the daily activities of an organization and render it unproductive. Noncompliance is also a substantial financial factor—breaches often incur attorney’s fees, prosecution, and penalties.
Each data breach accumulates costs related to investigation, response, notifications to regulatory organizations, victim identification, public response, victim outreach, and internal and external communication campaigns. Victims often require compensation, as well.
Take a Proactive Approach
In light of the mounting risks to security and the expenses of a breach, every organization must make risk-aware decisions. The ultimate goal: mitigate risk without addressing every threat or vulnerability
What costs are involved in bringing your organization into compliance? The following components typically make up compliance costs:
Data protection and enforcement – Preventing data leakage and enforcing data usage policies
Audits and assessments – Examining and inspecting the current stance of an organization compared to what is required by the compliance framework mandated
Policy development – developing internal policies that provide the structure needed to comply with various compliance regulation frameworks
Training – Training staff and others involved to carry out needed activities for compliance
Certification – certifying your business against various compliance regulations
Investment in security solutions and other specialized technologies (data loss prevention, governance, encryption, etc) – Investing in technology solutions that allow more easily bringing your business into compliance with regulation frameworks
To Sum Up
Compliance costs are significantly lower than that of non-compliance and leveraging technology solutions helps reinforce the process further. Holistic approaches are necessary for ensuring data compliance, security, and protection. As key functionalities of businesses evolve, surrounding malware protection, data usage, and backup, and audit applications, a number of AI-driven compliance solutions are coming to the fore. These solutions help shore up compliance programs, thereby avoiding risks and preventing costly repercussions of non-compliance.
While compliance costs are far less than the cost of non-compliance, using technology solutions can help to reduce those costs even further. Soffid provides a holistic approach to ensuring your data is protected, secure, and compliant.
Privileged account management can be defined as managing and auditing account and data access by privileged users. A privileged user is someone who has administrative access to critical systems.
Implementing a policy of least privilege minimizes unnecessary privilege allocation to ensure access to sensitive data is available only to those users who really need it.
Today, our CTO, Gabriel Buades, talk about how Soffid helps companies to secure their priviledge users.
Privileged Account Management is considered by many analysts and technologists as one of the most important security projects for reducing cyber risk and achieving high security ROI.
Based on recent threat activity, privileged accounts, not corporate data, might be the most valuable items within enterprise networks.
The domain of priviledge management is generally accepted as falling within the broader scope of identity and access management (IAM). Together, PAM and IAM help to provide fined-grained control, visibility, and auditability over all credentials and privileges.
While IAM controls provide authentication of identities to ensure that the right user has the right access as the right time, PAM layers on more granular visibility, control, and auditing over privileged identities and activities.
In a Tuesday session, titled “Security Leader’s Guide to Privileged Access Management,” Gartner research director Felix Gaehtgens said privileged access management is a crucial component of any security program because of the increasingly large scope of IT environments, privileged users, administrative tools, and IAM data such as passwords, encryption keys and certificates. Gaehtgens recommended organizations implement strict controls on privileged access such as limiting the total number of personal privileged accounts, creating more shared accounts and reducing the times and durations during which privileged access is granted.
It is a pleasure to invite you to our new webinar we are celebrating today, 23rd June.
During the webinar we will discuss about how PAM is emerging as one of the hottest topics in cybersecurity and why it must be a part of your overall IAM strategy.
According to a study based on an online survey of over 500 IT decision makers released by IDSA, over the last year, the shift to remote work has led to an increase in the number of identities, an increased focus on identity security, but a decrease in confidence in the ability to secure employee identities. The report examines the impact that the pandemic and increase in remote work had on Identity and Access Management (IAM) in the enterprise, as well as the implementation of identity-focused security strategies.
Four out of five participants believe that while identity management used to just be about access, it’s now mostly about security. In accordance, the majority of organizations have made changes to better align security and identity functions, with one of those changes being increasing CISO ownership of IAM.
Most organizations experienced an identity-related breach within the past two years
Despite additional security challenges introduced in 2020 with more identities, exponential remote access, and more personal devices, the number of identity-related breaches remains flat. 79% of organizations experienced an identity-related breach within the past two years, the same as reported in a previous study conducted by the IDSA in April 2020.
Increased attention also appears to be correlating with increased investment, as nearly all organizations will be investing in identity-related security outcomes in the next two years.
Remote work has significantly impacted identity security
83% report that remote work due to COVID-19 increased the number of identities
80% say the shift to remote work increased focus on identity security
Confidence in the ability to secure employee identities dropped from 49% to 32% in the past year
Breaches still prevalent, but investments in targeted prevention are accelerating
Identity breaches are not increasing, but they are having an impact on organizations
At least 70% report they began implementation or planning of identity-related security outcomes in the past two years
97% will make investments in identity-related security outcomes over the next two years
93% believe they might have prevented or minimized security breaches by using identity-related security outcomes
Security taking a broader role in identity management, with positive effects
64% report that they have made changes to better align security and identity functions within the last two years
87% report the CISO has a leadership role when it comes to IAM a dramatic contrast to 53% that said the same about the security team in 2019
Organizations where the CISO has ownership of IAM are more likely to say the security team has an excellent understanding of their identity strategy and implement identity-related security outcomes
Identity Defined Security Alliance Resources
An Identity Defined Security Outcome is a desired result that improves an organization’s security posture and reduces the risk of an identity-related breach or failed audit. According to the report, 93% of organizations believe that the IDSA’s Identity Defined Security Outcomes may have prevented or minimized the impact of the breaches they suffered. Included with each Identity Defined Security Outcome are vendor-neutral implementation approaches, which are well-defined patterns that combine identity and security capabilities.
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