The pandemic has had a great impact on daily life and the development of work. After the urgency to allow remote access for employees, expanding network capacity and VPN gateways, many companies have gone to the “review and adaptation” phase, thinking about the long term, since in many cases it has meant an increase in complexity, cost or even risk.
But what are the best practices to enable productive and secure remote work that we know about? User experience has a direct impact on productivity. IT must provide the right technologies. And for this, you need a robust solution, with improved performance and high security, but also transparent. Moving to a cloud-based Zero Trust access model that is scalable and dynamic will immediately deliver those benefits.
First of all, Zero Trust uses the Internet and optimization platforms that allow an improvement of the user experience. Additionally, with this approach we can provide specific access by application, based on identity with multi-factor authentication (MFA), and also conditional authorization based on device risk, thus significantly improving security.
But sometimes company devices are used from home for recreational use as well, which increases non-business traffic over the private WAN and in turn, can pose a security risk. An Akamai study found that the increased adoption of remote work led to a large increase in the number of devices exposed to malware, with an increased risk of these devices or the applications they access being compromised.
End-point protection and forcing a central point of traffic filtering have been the protection approaches. But this new approach to telecommuting introduces another consideration of scale and complexity for those on-premise solutions, which can be avoided by cloud security solutions such as Secure Web Gateway, also allowing other protections, such as DNS inspection, to be inserted that act before the detection chain, preventing malware from reaching the device and blocking “malicious” communications.
If corporate devices fail and access is required through a personal device, the risk increases again since it will hardly meet corporate standards. The Zero Trust solution provides access from any device with a browser to all applications, whether web or Windows-based and enables the application of additional security controls to avoid compromising sensitive company data.
