Remote workforces are shaping up to be a defining trend of 2020. Many organizations are adapting their strategy to enable remote working for an extended period-of-time.
In this context, collaboration technologies with robust video conferencing capabilities, like Webex Teams, and advanced endpoint technologies, like AMP for Endpoints, have become vital for organizations looking to maintain workforce productivity and visibility.
Remote work environments create more risk
According to a recent survey of U.S. workers, 97% have transitioned to a remote work environment. This rapid expansion of the remote workforce has created an expanded land of opportunity for hackers. In recent months, there’s been a rise in phishing and fraud attempts, as well as disinformation campaigns targeting remote workers.
To protect your business from new and emerging threats, it’s vital you have scalable security controls that can accommodate your remote workforce as it grows and evolves.
It’s also critical to provide security awareness training to employees to help them identify, avoid, and report malicious activity. Many organizations rushed to move their workforces online without providing sufficient training on security best practices.
Regardless of where they work, you need to encourage employees to practice good security hygiene. This means taking precautions, such as:
- Locking your computer screen
- Using trusted Wi-Fi access points only
- Storing business data on corporate-protected assets, not local systems
- Refraining from using a corporate device for personal use
You can use frameworks like NIST SP 800-46 for further guidance on teleworking and remote access security.
Endpoint solutions are more important than ever
As you operate in this new, borderless work environment, it’s important to leverage technology that allows you to monitor, track, investigate, and respond to threats. After all, the key to minimizing the impact of a security breach is by detecting and containing threats as quickly as possible – the longer the threat exists, the greater the damage it can cause.
For example, AMP for Endpoints provides the early detection and response capabilities you need to protect your remote work environment, while solutions like Umbrella block malicious domains before a host can make a connection.
With Stealthwatch Cloud, you can detect threats in your network and cloud environments in real time, reduce false positives, and get actionable intelligence to make your security team more efficient. The solution uses dynamic entity modeling and analytics to spot anomalies and distinguish normal from malicious device behaviors.
Combine expertise, platforms, and playbooks
Reducing the time it takes to detect and contain threats is not a process that technology can handle on its own. You need a team of security analysts to execute continuous monitoring, conduct complex investigations, and keep pace with current and new threats.
However, due to the lack of cybersecurity talent in the market and the high salaries commanded by security analysts, researchers, and responders, this can be a challenge. Without security operations staff to monitor and track threats, many organizations are unable to respond to, contain, and remediate those threats. Plus, internal teams are often focused on responding to high-priority threats.
This is why we created a global team of security experts to monitor, analyze, research, and respond to new and emerging threats around the clock.
We use Talos research to create robust use cases with information on specific threats and steps to proactively detect and respond to them.
Each of these use cases includes:
- An overview and description of the threat, including vectors, tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTP)
- Technologies to detect, contain, mitigate, remediate, or eradicate the threat
- The process of how the threat is detected, correlated, and validated
- Defined investigation and response playbooks
- An automation workflow from detection to investigation and response
By combining research, expert responders, threat analytics and automation technology, and secure cloud architecture, you can deliver fast, accurate, and consistent detection and response.
Remote work is here to stay
It’s critical you follow security best practices, provide ongoing security awareness training to your staff, use strong security technology, and have consistent monitoring, detection, and response capabilities. These will put your business in the best position to manage future threats.
If remote worker security is a rising concern for your organization, learn how the industry-leading expertise of Cisco Managed Detection and Response can help you protect what matters most.
Learn more at: www.cisco.com/go/mdr
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