First things first in Security in this WFH scenario
Updated: Oct 1, 2020
As a member of the IT team, you must be facing the challenges of ensuring that all your employees are safe along with all the data within your organization. The pressure is immense to ensure that access to your systems and data is given to only people you trust. In this scenario where things happen more reactively than proactively, there is so much scope that some of the most basic of things can be missed. Are you to be blamed? Maybe not, because of the immense pressure and timelines. Does the business realise this? No!
Identity and Access
A good place to start your journey of smooth WFH is to ensure that your employees are all getting the right access. And that the right employee is getting the right access. A quick checklist of what are the basic checks and balances one should maintain:
1. For your privileged users, like sys admins, database admins, server admins etc, you need to deploy a PIM/PAM solution
2. For other regular users, you need to deploy an Identity Management solution that is itself very safe and also ensures that it follows a zero-trust framework
3. For every user, deploying a Multi-factor Authentication solution is a must
4. A Single-sign On solution has become very important to ensure seamless and regulated access to applications
DMARC and Anti-phishing
Ensure that in these vulnerable times, your Domain is not being spoofed and that you will need to take care of phishing by being better prepared. A first step will be to make minor changes to your mail settings so that you are DMARC compliant. And sign-up with a DMARC provider who can monitor and manage your journey to the Reject mode.
At the same time, this is an important period of operations where your employees are most vulnerable to phishing attacks. A sense of understanding and analysis needs to be given to all your employees. Anti-phishing solutions come with built-in campaigns and reporting options. Deploying these takes minimum effort and time.
A strong end-point suite
A lot of organizations have been scouting for end-points on rent for their employees. Some that have been better prepared, have been giving employees company provided devices from the beginning. The thing that is of utmost importance is that every organization needs a strong end-point security suite that not only detects Day-0 threats, but also connects to a decent Threat Intelligence platform to give you up-to-date protection. An EDR solution is a must-have.
Strong Layer 7 Firewall
Usage of 3rd party applications will increase because people are working from home. A strong Layer 7 firewall will give you next generation protection long with threat intelligence.
These are starting points. Will you be 100% protected with these? No! Every good process has a starting point. The above solutions are basic, required and are 100% compulsory.
Code Analysis
If you have developers and have written your own applications and have the source code, then this is the right time for you to analyse the code and plug any vulnerabilities that may come up in the future.
Synoptiq can help you with all of the above solutions. Do visit our use-cases page here.