Advanced cybersecurity strategies for a hybrid world: Securing the post-pandemic workforce

The coronavirus pandemic has continued to ravage business institutions and social frontiers around the world for the second year running. Though, efforts for supplicating the virulent impact are steadily mounting with vaccination programs being conducted across the world. However, the severe changes imposed on humanity on account of the virus may be irreversible to state the least. The pandemic has activated seminal transformations in the business landscape around India and the world. Almost every company had to enable a swift digital transition and adopt remote working to stay relevant in the evolving post-pandemic business vista.

With this geographical paradigm shift in workplace operations, professionals all over the world have been forced to work from domestic confines. This has seemingly eliminated the thin line between corporate computer resources and personal machines as employees now must race against time to fulfil work-related obligations and struggle to keep their remote systems secure and functional from unwanted invaders. The onus surely falls on company IT teams to efficiently assess the ins and outs of personal firewalls and remote system fortifications whilst ensuring that the best cybersecurity practices are being optimally adhered to.

The Work-From-Home (WFH) routine has proven to be a handful for companies around the globe as their IT teams have persistently struggled to provide the necessary tools for conducting everyday affairs remotely. This zero-hour corporate business strategy has essentially unfolded around an overarching shift towards digitization and remote working to preserve business continuity and survival in these testing times.

Murali Urs, Country Manager, India, Barracuda Networks

Accordingly, business networking teams have rebounded from various differing security configurations, mostly by trial and error to arrive at any feasible corporate setup. These hasty turnarounds in the official working processes have unintentionally opened the door to a plethora of vicious corporate attack vectors. The relatively low protection offered by homebound network systems and higher proximity of surface attacks has visibly compounded the chances of cybersecurity attacks and spear-phishing strikes that can result in business losses and setbacks worth billions. A 2020 report on ‘Brave the New Normal’ stated that 66% of organisations experienced a major security scare since the remote working transition, while 67% indicated that their employees reported an increase in email phishing attacks.

It is not just multiple assets and theft of valuable data that is at stake here. Cybercriminals often employ new-age threat vectors, state-of-the-art tools, and malicious technologies to cripple major organizations and business institutions. And, this cybersecurity conundrum has only surged with the advent of the pandemic-induced turbulence as malicious attackers are effectively utilizing this period of instability to orchestrate critical strikes and attacks on companies around the world.

This calls for major improvements of security stacks and cyber defence architectures on the part of big-league organizations. The rising wave of attacks and the ever-expansive cyber threat matrix has clearly outlined the imperative need to develop and optimize novel cybersecurity technologies, defensive shields, and protective strategies to address the burgeoning threat landscape and resolve emerging issues. Needless to say, the business world requires the culmination of some long-term changes to tackle the multiplying threatscape. This involves embracing on-the-security and data-protection innovations that will warrant secure workforces, networks, applications, and official data as we glide into this brave new world.

It is essential for cybersecurity officers to promote a holistic view of the impending threat matrix. This translates into initiating a mega-scale shift to an actual hybrid workforce that is characterized by flexible work hours, agile operations, freedom of device usage irrespective of space and time alongside an extensive adoption of Zero Trust Network access strategies that can help in the constant cyber-surveillance of each user, device, resource, and tool to ensure transparency. The new-age cybersecurity stratagems will revolve around application security measures evolving from point solutions to a truly comprehensive platform that covers not only the entire developmental process but also monitors the behaviour of in-production apps.

It is somewhat ironic that emails continue to be the leading instrument of productivity as well as the most preferred threat vector for malicious actors to take advantage of ill-protected business networks for conducting data breaches in the presence of remote workers. IT teams need to make sure that these threat vectors are continuously defended from compromised networks, and email attacks. Therefore, organisations must deploy cloud-enabled, enterprise-grade security solutions to protect their email domain, networks, data and applications. In doing so, they can take advantage of artificial intelligence, deploy account-takeover protection, train the employees to recognise and report attacks, and set up strong internal policies to prevent fraud.

Email protection is an essential part of cybersecurity strategies in organizations today to prevent employee accounts from getting compromised, and users from getting tricked. Moreover, considering, emails have to be preserved for legal, regulatory, and other business reasons, proper techniques must be used to guarantee secure access to email storage over the long term. Secure email gateways are no longer sufficient to defend against today’s sophisticated social-engineering attacks. These attacks bypass traditional security and end up costing organizations’ time, money, and brand equity. Email Protection solutions can prevent targeted attacks with their multi-layered approach that combines a secure email gateway, AI-powered fraud protection, and advanced security awareness training. This results in comprehensive protection against business email compromise, account takeover, and other advanced email threats.

Even though the market has started adjusting to the major and lasting shift that COVID-19 has caused in the work environments, it will be absolutely essential for the security architectures to harness the latest innovations emerging in cyber technology to stay two steps ahead of the threat curve.

Author: Murali Urs, Country Manager, India, Barracuda Networks