Tips for Your Organization’s Transition from COVID-19 Crisis Mode to Proactive Security in the "New Normal"
The move to cloud computing and a highly remote workforce has been on the horizon and building momentum for decades; with COVID-19 as an accelerant it looks like organizations won’t be throttling back.
Here are three things to do now to secure your reshaped IT ecosystem:
- Identify all of your assets – especially those in cloud environments
- Understand the security risks across your attack surface
- Pay extra attention to remote access and VPN gateways – areas of rapid expansion for many organizations
As sheltering-in-place restrictions took effect, some organizations went from 0 to 100% in terms of their remote workforce. And now a full 74 percent of organizations plan to shift some employees to remote work permanently, according to a Gartner survey.1 This surge of permanent remote workers will also lead to an increase in cloud-hosted virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), desktop as a service (DaaS), and remote access VPN that was considered a dying technology until the necessities of COVID-19 and sheltering in place revived it, according to Gartner.2
A flood of public announcements reinforce working from home as status-quo, with many major organizations keeping their teams out of the office until at least the new year. Meanwhile Nationwide Insurance has decided to close its buildings entirely and have its 4,000 employees telecommute permanently.3
As this shift to digital resiliency becomes the new normal, the ongoing challenges of securing a cloud-based and remote workforce environment haven’t gone away. As the still-growing push to the cloud continues, a critical business need — cited by 65% of the respondents of the O’Reilly Cloud Adoption in 2020 study — are more IT workers who are fully-trained in cloud-based security for migrating applications and implementing cloud-based infrastructure.4