3 Vulnerabilities to Plug to Secure Your Customers’ Remote Workforce
The migration to a remote workforce hit fast forward in the past year as businesses around the world asked employees to do from home what they used to do in the office. For some companies, this was an expansion of existing remote work activities, while it was a sudden shock for others.
But after a year of attending business meetings in pajamas and zero-minute commutes, many employees are eager to keep their current work-from-home arrangements, at least some of the time, even after the pandemic is under control. At the same time, businesses are realizing they can save money by reducing their office footprints or eliminate them altogether while tapping into a much broader talent pool.
As businesses transition to a new normal that includes remote work as a regular part of everyday life, they face a host of extra security challenges. More employees working remotely means more opportunity for cybercriminals to breach weaker defenses across a distributed network of personal devices, corporate laptops, unsecured Wi-Fi networks, and exponentially more remote connections to their servers and applications.
MSPs have a unique role to play in this new IT ecosystem. On one hand, they have customers struggling to navigate a remote work world, unsure of how to manage this diaspora of employees and endpoints. At the same time, MSPs are on high alert for security breaches into the systems they manage, desperate to avoid damaging attacks, data theft and outages.
Here are the three top things MSPs should focus on to secure their clientele’s remote workforce:
- Insecure endpoints
An IT network is only as secure as its weakest point. And in a world where employees are logging in from their apartments, coffee shops and coworking spaces, those weak spots are in the hands of well-meaning employees in vulnerable situations.
To protect those endpoints in a remote work environment, MSPs must deploy pervasive monitoring while minimizing employee disruptions. These frequent check-ins to ensure a secure environment should be largely invisible to remote staff who don’t want their productivity interrupted by automatic reboots in the middle of the workday or background processes that grind their other applications to a halt.
VPNs, two-factor authentication and cloud backups are no-brainer tactics MSPs can employ to increase endpoint security with minimal end user disruption. And, when issues do arise, MSPs need the ability to support users without requiring them to come into the office, which may not be open or anywhere near their physical location. MSP staff with the right tools can initiate remote control sessions to update settings and solve problems as they arise.
- Patchwork patching
Keeping software up to date is a no-brainer, but the degree of difficulty increases significantly when they’re not all under the direct control of IT. The combination of personal devices and client-owned devices distributed to remote workers makes it much more challenging to keep them all running the latest-and-greatest versions of operating systems and applications.
Many of the assumptions MSPs make about an IT environment are now out the window. Not every device is on the corporate network, and those that connect remotely may be doing so at odd or inconsistent times using more tenuous network connections.
This may require a rethinking or moderate adjustment of how MSPs both check to see what all those endpoints are running and how they distribute and install updates. Taking inventory of each device’s current status, as well as scheduling and rolling out those updates, may need a modification, which may even include barring worker access to critical systems until patches are installed.
- User education
While MSPs eat, sleep and breathe IT security, that’s not the case for most workers. There may be some vague awareness or maybe their social media account was hacked, but for the most part there’s a baseline assumption that securing their work devices and network is someone else’s problem.
However, the actions and precautions every employee takes are an essential component in fortifying the entire IT environment’s defenses. Whether it’s not clicking on a “phishy” email link or using a harder-to-crack password, there’s a lot each remote worker can do to help out the cause.
Since most employees won’t proactively seek out best practices, MSPs must help their clients train up their staff on essential security protocols. This begins by explaining
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