How to Secure a Perimeter-less Environment
The promise of a hybrid work model brings with it lots of benefits for employers and employees, but also presents many IT challenges. From a cybersecurity perspective, the distributed application architecture brought on by hybrid working models makes it even more critical to protect all traffic flows. This perimeter-less environment is the new normal when considering home users, cloud and SaaS applications. IT leaders are increasingly considering security frameworks that converge network and security to focus on the performance, reliability and security of the perimeter-less environment.
We recently sat down with Sean Aviv from the Comcast Business solution architect team to learn more about the needs and challenges they are hearing from customers as they continue to adjust their cybersecurity posture to support the hybrid model. As a result of the shift, they are seeing an increased need to focus on all threat vectors, including securing the corporate infrastructure, cloud environments and home networks while ensuring a great user experience and application performance.
The shift to distributed workforces has brought on a lot of change from a cybersecurity perspective. What are some of the more foundational shifts that businesses need to make to protect themselves from threats?
The increase in distributed workforce requirements–along with increased adoption of cloud, infrastructure-as-a-service, SaaS applications and IoT–requires a holistic approach to securing the enterprise. With hybrid work alongside a distributed application architecture, it is critical to protect all traffic flows as users, corporate data and business-critical assets can reside anywhere. As organizations look to optimize their security posture, they will be shifting toward software-defined networking (SDN), micro-segmentation and threat response automation technologies. Solutions like Comcast Business ActiveCore can streamline network threat monitoring and management, help businesses secure their corporate data, and manage the attack surface through network segmentation.
What are you hearing from Comcast Business customers? What is their level of concern, and how quickly are they making changes?
We are absolutely seeing an increased awareness of cyberthreats such as ransomware, DDoS and software vulnerability concerns. Customers understand that with a distributed workforce and applications migrating to the cloud, they have more exposure to security risks and data breaches. At Comcast Business, we help customers safeguard their networks and data via high-performance and secure architectures leveraging solutions such as ActiveCore Secure SD-WAN, carrier grade DDoS mitigation and other services in our extensive managed services portfolio. From a speed-to-market perspective, we are seeing certain industry verticals adopting advanced security technologies and threat response automation at a faster pace. Manufacturing and distribution, healthcare, financial services, retail, education and government are leading the charge.
What are some of the key cybersecurity challenges that remain for IT leaders?
Cyberthreats are continually evolving, becoming more sophisticated and more difficult to detect. A strong cybersecurity strategy is always on, continuous, and requires people, process and technology. A key challenge is delivering a complete security strategy that is aligned with each organization’s specific business risks. The strategy must consist of the right security technologies, policies and procedures, ongoing security assessments, threat intelligence, and a threat detection and response strategy. The key is to take a proactive approach to cybersecurity, and to mitigate threats ahead of time and not wait for the attack to take place.
Are there any challenges specific to supporting a more hybrid workforce?
A hybrid workforce requires organizations to look beyond the corporate network and identify additional cyber risks that exist in the home such as Wi-Fi connections, personal devices (BYOD) and the increase in phishing attempts. These potential exploits can lead to a breach impact across the organization, which is why a comprehensive approach to security must be taken. This includes endpoint protection, MFA and access control, as well as secure connectivity to the internet, corporate assets and cloud applications. These can be addressed with the combination of a strong VPN solution, secure SD-WAN platform, firewall-as-a-service or other technologies that align to the SASE framework to deliver a resilient and secure end-to-end solution. Click on Page 2 to continue reading…
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