LEAST PRIVILEGED, MAXIMUM SECURITY

JOHN HATHAWAY, REGIONAL VICE PRESIDENT MEI, BEYONDTRUST, DISCUSSES WHY ORGANISATIONS NEED TO TAKE A PRAGMATIC APPROACH TO IMPROVING SECURITY AND HOW A ‘LEAST PRIVILEGE’ STRATEGY CAN ENABLE ENTERPRISES STAY CYBER RESILIENT.

- JOHN HATHAWAY

How have the unprecedented challenges brought by the COVID-19 pandemic impacted the threat landscape?

If we take a step back and look at the landscape prior to the pandemic, the IT world had already become more complex over the last couple of years with the introduction of hybrid cloud environments, increased digitalisation, implementation of Internet of Things solutions and so on. Now, if you push a pandemic into that environment, it will leave a lot of organisations exposed from not being ready enough to deal from a workforce that works from home.

The way that cybercriminals and bad actors think is that the minute they smell any sort of opportunity, they write zeroday attacks to target people working from unsecured endpoints or networks. In the past, maybe an organisation’s employee takes their corporate devices to use at home or uses their personal laptops to access corporate environments, these scenarios are quite routine and security teams can address any potential issues post-haste. But if you apply that to billions of people that are now working from home, are corporate environments ready to deal with that? The answer that we’ve seen is – definitely not.

We’ve seen organisations across the world scramble to find a strategic approach to remote access, which have opened challenges for endpoint security. So, at the center of this conversation, the endpoint is where this pandemic has hit security.