The COVID-19 pandemic will usher in long-term changes to corporate cybersecurity policies and investments — largely due to the rapid onset of remote work — according to a Cisco report.
For the Future of Secure Remote Work Report, Cisco surveyed 3,196 IT decisions makers beginning in June — four or five months after organizations globally sent their employees to work from home to protect them from COVID-19 — through Sept. 4. Respondents came from 21 markets across 30 industries including financial services, health care, architecture, transportation, and education. And they answered questions about the challenges of moving some or all of an organization’s workforce to a remote environment seemingly overnight, and how their cybersecurity priorities and investments changed to enable this work from home and hybrid work transition.
“The future of work is going to be largely hybrid,” said Jeetu Patel, SVP and GM of Cisco’s Security and Applications business unit. “We have to make sure that we can empower a secure remote workforce when people are at home, and we have to enable a safe return to the office when we are at work. And that has to happen with an emphasis on security and privacy.”
Cisco Says Cybersecurity More Important Now
In fact, 85% of respondents globally said that cybersecurity is extremely important or more important than it was before the pandemic. This was consistent across small, medium, and large businesses at 79%, 87%, and 88%, respectively.
Companies worldwide said they experienced an increase in cybersecurity threats and alerts during this time as attackers tried to take advantage of employees access to corporate networks and cloud applications. The survey found 61% experienced a jump of 25% or more.
So, perhaps not surprisingly, of all the technology that companies adopted to enable remote work, cybersecurity came in as the No. 1 priority (52% ranked it first), followed by collaboration tools (41%), and professional services (27%).
Additionally, 96% reported changes in their security policies to support remote work. The top-rated change was increased virtual private network (VPN) capacity (59%), increased web controls and acceptable use policy (55%), and the implementation of multi-factor authentication (MFA) (53%).
While the No. 2 and No. 3 policy changes leaned toward zero-trust security, which is often viewed as an alternative to and replacement for VPNs, Patel said, adding the security policies, in fact, compliment each other.
“Your risk level goes down precipitously when you’re using multi-factor authentication versus not,” he explained, noting Cisco’s Duo security business. MFA provides more granular access on top of VPNs, which provide access to the entire corporate network. However, VPNs can provide security professionals huge amounts of telemetry, which can be valuable to them as they work to protect corporate assets, he added.
“The major asset that we have at Cisco is we’ve got 150 million endpoints already deployed and that creates a level of telemetry that can really help security professionals over time,” Patel said. “So I don’t actually see them as being in conflict with one another, I see those as being relatively complimentary.”
Post-Pandemic Cybersecurity Future
Looking ahead to the post-pandemic future, Cisco says remote working will drive long- term changes in cybersecurity policies. It found 95% of organizations indicate that some portion of these new security changes they made to accommodate remote work will be permanent. Along these lines, 66% of respondents say that they will likely increase their cybersecurity investments due to the COVID-19 situation. This echoes similar surveys, like a Microsoft report from August.
But security professionals often point to challenges (like product fatigue and environment complexity) as something that will spark long-term changes across the sector, such as increased investments and greater interoperability. And, in fact, 59% of organizations said that the lack of employee awareness and education was the top challenge faced in reinforcing cybersecurity protocols for remote working, and this was followed by too many products to manage and toggle (50%). So what makes COVID-19 any different?
“These have been age-old problems that have existed for a while, but they haven’t been existential to maintain your sanity up until now,” Patel said. “And now, there’s a reason for us to go fix these problems. Because if you don’t, you’re going to have a lot more breaches, because the amount of breaches is going up at a pretty alarming rate. And number two: your employees are just simply not going to be productive.”
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October 27, 2020 at 01:49AM
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