Pravir Dahiya, Chief Technology Officer, Tata Teleservices
The present world is not how we imagined it three years ago, nor did we expect our future to be like this. We all grappled with the situation in our own ways, and enterprises, in particular, had to change their operations to create seamless channels of coordination between employees working from home and the actual working spaces.
Adversities, in a way, were a blessing in disguise for economies and businesses to streamline their operations for the better, helping us turn them into opportunities. This led to the widespread acceptance of new technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML) and big data analytics, which had been predicted to be the future of developed working environments.
Now, as the world opens up, enterprises are welcoming their employees back to the office with a new system of hybrid working. For employees who have gotten accustomed to the work-from-home (WFH) lifestyle, many companies have established the fact that WFH backed by smart and secure solutions has maintained business continuity and delivered seamless customer experiences.
There is no denying the fact that the pandemic has recalibrated our work structure for an indefinite duration. And perhaps this is one of the major reasons that many organisations are adopting a hybrid work culture, blending on-premises and remote working. Several studies have revealed that employees appreciate the work-life balance and flexibility provided by the hybrid model of working.
As remote working becomes the key to the future, what imperatives can take it to the next level?
The real challenge for employees working from home is ensuring a secure and connected network. The cybersecurity market boomed when several discrepancies and unwanted interventions were found in the overall working of employees, largely posed by viruses. To take remote working to the next level, companies need to secure their systems and provide a cybersecurity cover for their employees.
Safeguarding the network is the topmost priority, and this can be achieved through:
- Virtual private networks (VPN): VPN is one of the most cost-effective and simple ways to secure an organisation’s network, data and sensitive applications from unauthorised access by employees. VPNs help protect the core systems of a company and the devices that are being used by its employees. The major benefit of a VPN is that it adds an extra blanket of security that helps employees hide their internet protocol address, encrypting the data that is being transferred between devices, and masking the location, the sender and the recipient of the data. While most large enterprises do have VPNs in place, smaller organisations also need to deploy them so that to secure sensitive business information within the company.
- Having all security systems in place for VPNs: Deploying a VPN alone is not sufficient. One needs to ensure that the VPN service is providing the highest levels of security to the company and the overall network. This can be achieved through encryption. The longer the length of an encryption key, the stronger the encryption.
- MAC-Binding for additional security: Despite having several security systems in place, a data breach is still a possibility as hackers have become smarter and more skilled at breaking into security systems and stealing data. MAC-Binding is a mechanism that helps in controlling access by ensuring that only predefined devices are provided access to the company’s closed networks, as identified by their MAC addresses. This also discourages employees from using their personal devices on the company’s systems for official work, providing another blanket against unwanted viruses that may cause a cyberbreach.
- Multifactor authentication is the key: All of us have understood the importance of multifactor authentication to stop unauthorised users from accessing protected networks. It is important to ensure that the IT team in your organisation has at least set up two-factor authentication for all employees who need to log into their company user profile remotely.
- Having a zero-trust security policy: This is the latest cutting-edge security model. It maintains super-strict access controls, and does not trust anyone, even by default. It is not based solely on an employee’s location, but also ensures that only the right people have access to the right data at specified times. Several other software solutions powered by AI, ML, etc., efficiently analyse key parameters such as the environment, devices, activity and user response to determine any holistic risks.
In today’s ever-evolving data-driven digital world, security is the key for companies to maintain the overall health of their businesses. Having security systems in place has become extremely important because even a small misuse of data can be detrimental to a company’s reputation and financials. It also helps in streamlining remote working, as the security blanket provides a lot more confidence to employees to work freely.
