How to Enhance Cybersecurity in Remote-Work Era?

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The sudden shift to remote working due to the COVID-19 pandemic as well as the accelerated adoption of digital collaboration tools required not just scaling up of organizations’ IT infrastructure but also an evolution of the security practices. The pandemic was a black swan event for cybersecurity. 

This year, organizations will look at building a strong cyber resiliency program and follow a ‘secure by design’ principle while balancing user experience and productivity.

Organizations will have to take several measures in order to secure remote working, suggests globalbankingandfinance.com:

• Organizations must continue cloud adoption to embrace the benefits of scalability and reliability for business-critical applications as well as cost optimization. 
• Remote working not only expands the threat surface but also creates new surfaces for attack. The first casualty of remote working is perimeter security as employees’ access collaboration tools from personal, untrusted devices on home Wi-Fi. With perimeter security no longer the line of defense, the existing remote and VPN solutions might not be enough, and the organizations will have to shift their security paradigm to a borderless security architecture to allow business continuity from anywhere in the world. A borderless security architecture involves zero trust network access, identity and access management, and securing the endpoints. 
• New technologies: While artificial intelligence and deep learning can be used to analyze data to detect threats or unwarranted activities, machine learning can help in identification and hence elimination of advanced persistent threats. Similarly, behavioral analytics tools look at patterns of human and machine activity and use advanced analytics to detect meaningful anomalies to help foil cyberattacks. The use of blockchain with AI can establish a robust verification system to keep potential cyber threats at bay.
• Creating a security culture – a strong security culture is both a mindset and a mode of operation. When employees intuitively understand cybersecurity risks associated with everyday activities and mitigate those with confidence in alignment with organization’s security policies, it reduces risk of insider incidents and leads to increased security compliance.
• Modernizing security architecture to enable faster security integrations and deployments as well as catch up with the rapid adoption of hybrid setups with public cloud, private cloud, and on-premise infrastructure. The key is to establish strong architecture for data, systems, and security.