Written by: Christopher Ghosio, VP of Security & Network Engineering
Over the past month many organizations have drastically changed their operations. Many have gone from a typical office environment to a fully remote workforce almost overnight to help prevent the spread of COVID-19. The amazing efforts of countless IT teams and Service Providers is allowing us all to settle into this new normal.
Although many of us are used to having a company laptop and work from home regularly via secure methods, we are seeing a large number of organizations who transitioned to a remote workforce without the proper security measures in place.
Now that we are settling into this new normal it is a good time for a second look to ensure that we have all properly secured our remote workforce and company assets.
For remote access solutions we are typically seeing one of these scenarios:
We obviously want to move folks up into the top two options when possible, but obtaining additional laptops for staff that may have only had office desktops is difficult to do at this time with supply shortages. We have seen some companies deploy the company desktop to the employees home, which can then be connected in one of the two top methods.
In the scenarios where companies are reliant on employees using their home computers, it is important to take or offer as much control of its security posture as possible. Offering a centrally controlled endpoint protection suite (AntiVirus, etc) and checking for its presence upon connecting to the SSLVPN can be a step in the right direction. Also the policies on these SSLVPN users should be limited to only allow access to limited resources, such as a server running Remote Desktop Services.
In all cases a recheck of how we are deploying patches for both the applications and operating systems should be evaluated. Many organizations require systems to be connected to the corporate LAN in order to receive updates. Patching is one of the most important preventive tasks we should be performing to maintain a secure environment. Powernet is a trusted Managed Services provider and is here to help with any questions & concerns you have.
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