Many organizations in the Middle East are now facing a rapidly expanding remote workforce, and this represents a new way of working. The Dubai Future Foundation predicted that remote working will be “the new norm” in the long-term and that company policies will adapt to reflect the change. As your organization scales to support an increasing number of remote workers in the near term, it is an optimal time to re-evaluate your security strategies and technologies with an emphasis on ensuring they can support security and productivity in equal measure.
Here are four strategies you can activate immediately to put this into practice:
Visibility into the applications your employees take advantage of on a day-to-day basis provides necessary insight into your employees’ needs and makes clear how they are solving challenges and getting their jobs done. A clear understanding of the cloud applications people use and how they use them enables you to mitigate risks and better protect sensitive. A cloud access security broker (CASB) lets you see which managed and unsanctioned applications are deployed within your organization and how users are connecting to IT resources.
What’s most important to your employees is accessing the applications they need to get their jobs done. Shadow IT will naturally proliferate in any organization that doesn’t provide sanctioned and well-supported tools to enable workforce productivity. As your workforce rapidly moves to a remote model, focus on giving remote workers safe ways to use the software they prefer.
Downtime has a negative impact on employee productivity. However, it’s also the case that many legacy security products inadvertently degrade application performance by backhauling traffic to the datacenter for packet inspection.
If systems or applications are slow and unreliable, employees often look for workarounds to keep projects moving forward. And in many of those cases, this may mean bypassing security measures you have in place. One way to prevent this: migrate more network security into the cloud so that remote workers can more efficiently and securely go directly to cloud apps, and the web, through cloud security services – such as web security and CASB.
Looking to reign in a diverse assortment of managed and unmanaged devices? You’ll need to enforce policies and exercise account protections in a uniform, consistent fashion. This is further complicated by a lack of consistency across software-as-a-service (SaaS) application portfolios. A comprehensive platform that enables you to enforce access control policies consistently across the whole of your cloud-based environment and distributed, mobile workforce is essential for securing remote employees without setting up roadblocks. CASB technology helps here as well.
The global trend in which growing numbers of organizations embrace cloud services, mobile device use, and workplace flexibility will continue to proliferate. Here at Forcepoint, our mission is to safeguard human potential and to support you with the tools you need to enable your workforce to work without friction from anywhere, anytime safely.
