Netskope, CrowdStrike, Okta, and Proofpoint are joining together to help better safeguard organizations by delivering an integrated, Zero Trust security strategy that is designed to protect today’s dynamic and remote working environments at scale.
The sudden shift to a remote workforce due to the COVID-19 pandemic has driven many organizations to accelerate their multi-year digital transformation plans and increase their focus on areas such as remote collaboration and corporate access, sales, and customer service changes due to different buying behaviors, and critical cloud infrastructure and security. To optimize these areas, an organization’s entire digital strategy must be architected and deployed at speed — without compromising business continuity.
However, this rapid transition has also forced security and IT teams to find more robust security solutions quickly — with fewer resources and without the practical guidance they need to execute successfully.
Challenges in Securing a Remote Workforce
Increased Attack Surface
The growing sophistication of cyber threats and the fact that working remotely increases attack surfaces means that endpoint solutions designed for an office-based corporate environment are no longer effective.
Securing a remote workforce requires a strong layered defense approach and a modern Zero Trust security architecture to help keep organizations’ users, endpoints, data, and networks safe from modern attacks. Everything from access controls to device posture to monitoring and remediation has to be highly coordinated to ensure a strong security stack that provides resiliency and flexibility without compromising productivity.
Lack of Training
Given the speed of change required by shelter-in-place directives, companies have been forced to allow workers to use their personal devices in lieu of company-provided assets, and also ensure they could access corporate assets, data, and hundreds of apps from anywhere in the world. However, many organizations are struggling to provide the same level of security and access to their newly remote workforce, along with the same seamless experience their employees are used to — and it is becoming increasingly clear that many do not have adequate awareness of the cybersecurity threats facing a remote workforce. According to CrowdStrike’s recent Work Security Index global survey, 53% of respondents had not been provided with any additional cybersecurity training on the risks associated with remote work, and for small businesses, 69% of respondents reported having received no additional cybersecurity training.
Compliance Challenges
At the same time, compliance requirements in regulated industries still need to be met. The number of collaboration channels and the amount of cloud data dispersed within and across SaaS applications have increased exponentially, leaving sensitive data unprotected and exposed to cyberattacks. Netskope Threat Labs found that 20% of users have sensitive data moving between cloud apps — and even more concerning, 37% of this sensitive data is involved in data loss prevention (DLP) violations.
Lack of Comprehensive Scalable Security Across Remote Workforces
According to 451 Research’s Voice of the Enterprise: Digital Pulse Coronavirus Flash Survey (March 2020), 38% of organizations expect expanded or universal work from home to continue long term. But while organizations are looking for cost-effective, scalable solutions for their dynamic workforce, adversaries are relentless as ever, employing social engineering phishing tactics and sophisticated ransomware that uses hard-to-detect “living off the land” (LOTL) techniques.
Solution that Simplifies Zero Trust Security
Another facet of this joint solution is that it will fundamentally change the way organizations approach Zero Trust security architectur