The novel COVID-19 pandemic has changed the way organizations work. The sudden transition to remote work has forced organizations to look for temporary fixes to bridge the gap, leaving their endpoints exposed to an unprecedented threat landscape. Insecure internet connections, a lack of perimeter security, and the inability to implement effective security policies have made remote endpoints a breeding ground for threat actors.

A majority of companies are moving towards a work-from-home model in an effort to reduce costs and improve operational agility. However, along with these advantages, a remote workforce brings up numerous security concerns. Download this e-book to learn how to secure your network and safely support a remote workforce.

While keeping data safe from modern cyberthreats is difficult enough, you also have to keep in mind compliance with common regulations, i.e., ensuring your company’s compliance to SOX, which deals with transparency in disclosures from public companies. Nowadays, it’s not enough for businesses to rely on dismissive financial documents that satisfy the intermittent audit; you need to level up your game, and create detailed day-to-day records of activities.

With a majority of the workforce now adopting a work-from-home routine, maintaining the normal functioning of your network and ensuring compliance with industry standards is not an easy job. When employees are working remotely, it is especially crucial to ensure network compliance with industry standards and internal policies to secure your network from cybersecurity breaches.

As the COVID-19 pandemic continues to force employees to work from home, businesses are facing new and unique challenges to ensure business continuity. When remote work is mandated due to COVID-19, the transition isn’t smooth for many businesses; not every business has the infrastructure to make the abrupt shift, even given the immediate need to go remote.

Email-based attacks can take many forms, and are typically deployed by cybercriminals in order to extort ransom or leak sensitive data. Just recently, a banking Trojan named Trickbot targeted Italy, a hotspot for COVID-19 cases, with email spam campaigns. While the email subject line is in line with the daily concerns and talks about spread of the virus, the attachment was actually a malicious script.

In the new normal, if your business has chosen remote operations, this might attract malicious actors. Hackers prey on the remote workforce whose vulnerability has increased in multifold ways. While infrastructural concerns, such as working outside the corporate IT network and using home Wi-Fi are inevitable, other issues, including using personal devices and retaining privileges to access more than required business resources add to the magnitude of this vulnerability.

In part one of this two-part blog series, we discussed seven reasons security configurations are an important part of an organization’s security posture. In this part, we’ll look at eight security configurations that can help with ensuring comprehensive control over the endpoints, avoiding vulnerabilities, deploying security configurations, and automating a number of verticals of endpoint security.

Security configurations are security-specific settings used to secure heterogeneous endpoints such as servers, desktops, laptops, mobile devices, and tablets. As endpoints in your network diversify, securing each endpoint becomes a challenge. One way to ensure effective endpoint security is by automating it, which is where security configurations come into play. Security configurations are utilized to secure and control every facet of your network.

Working from home has become our new normal, with many of our jobs being performed remotely. The experience of working remotely can be as seamless as it was from our workplace, with all the technological advancements available today. Businesses have also put network security on the forefront by implementing use of virtual private networks (VPNs). This enables users to securely access confidential information hosted on the organizations’ servers.