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Home > Successfully Scaling Cybersecurity for Remote Work

Part II: Safeguard Data Everywhere

As security teams are tasked with the duty of rapidly scaling up protections for remote workers, one of the key considerations they must keep in mind is how to safeguard data no matter where it resides or travels. This is hardly a new problem. However, the vastly broadened scope of remote work today requires security teams to revisit policies and technologies. Some solutions that may have been sufficient for isolated use cases don't adequately protect a completely distributed workforce.

The sudden rollout of fully remote work has pushed a lot of data that formerly resided within corporate networks outside of those traditional security perimeters. What's more, even the data that was already in the cloud is now more likely to be shared or moved across a broader range of SaaS services as newly remote workers figure out how to stay productive during this period of transition.

In order to keep up with these changes, security teams must quickly adjust. The first step is to provide users with secure connectivity to all of the systems and data stores they need to get their jobs done. But on top of that, security should also include policies and practices that keep data safe as workers interact with it.

Unify visibility and control
Safeguarding data everywhere starts with visibility and control. Many organizations have various means of tracking data usage and policy compliance within separate dashboards for certain cloud applications, on-premises systems, networks and endpoints. However, they often lack the capability to see it or control it all in one place.

That siloed approach makes it hard enough to protect data in a traditional work scenario, but it's nearly impossible for security teams to manage in this era of fully remote work. There are new situations where employees may be sharing sensitive data in video conferencing applications, where rarely used mobile devices can now expose data to insecure Bluetooth connections, and where troves of critical data can potentially be printed en masse via a home printer.

In order to safeguard data everywhere, organizations need a way to manage unified policies in a single console that provides views across endpoints, on-premises systems, the corporate network and all cloud applications. 

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Adjust data policies based on behavior
With a unified view in place, it becomes much easier for organizations to baseline normal user interactions with data in order to identify anomalous behavior that can tip security teams off to policy violations and emerging threats.

But just raising alerts on these problems isn't enough. Already overloaded security teams need to prioritize in order to handle the volume of alerts by aligning data policies to user behavior. Organizations should consider ways to automatically tighten policies and data privileges when risk levels are heightened. This way, security teams won’t need to worry about meticulously policing data usage across an entire remote workforce. Business can go on as usual for those users that interact with data the same way they always have. But when risk levels are heightened through abnormal and risky behavior, the system can trigger stronger access policies and reduced data privileges. This puts in a speedbump to prevent data from flying out the door, while giving security professionals a chance to take a closer look at the most egregious problems.

When security teams can leverage behavioral insights to automatically block the biggest threats and prioritize alert responses, they can also provide the fastest and most efficient coverage for their data security program, no matter where the data or the users are located.

For more information on how to scale your security strategy to protect people and data everywhere, watch this webcast: Securing Your Remote Workforce and Keeping Your Enterprise Safe.

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