Last updated on May 20, 2022
How to Protect Your Company from Remote and Hybrid Work Cybersecurity Challenges
What is a Hybrid Work Model, and How does it Affect Cybersecurity?
Companies shifting to remote work has resulted in many challenges, from maintaining access to business-critical applications to ensuring connectivity and productivity. However, one of the biggest challenges for business IT departments is maintaining security across remote or hybrid work environments.
Cybersecurity is only going to grow more essential, complicated, and demanding in the future, and the threat of malicious activity continues to grow, with cybercrimes in the US spiking by 300% in the early days of the pandemic.
Not only can data breaches be extremely costly for the original organization (cybercrime is expected to cost the world $6 trillion by the end of 2021 and will climb to $10.5 trillion by 2025), but it can have far-reaching consequences for a company’s vendors, suppliers, and customers.
While data security can be particularly important (and complex) in heavily regulated industries such as government and healthcare, it’s a high priority for companies across all verticals, with industries such as manufacturing—and consequently, supply chain and logistics—requiring increasingly sophisticated cybersecurity measures to deal with the cybersecurity challenges in hybrid working.
This post will cover common cybersecurity challenges and security threats companies face today and then explain how technology can help solve them.
Top 5 Cybersecurity Challenges Businesses Face
First, let’s take a look at the top five most prevalent challenges that companies and their IT teams are experiencing.
1. Securing Business Data in a Remote (and Hybrid) World
Securing sensitive data is a significant problem for IT departments that must manage remote or hybrid workforces. In fact, 52% of legal and compliance leaders feel that cybersecurity and data breaches are the most increased third-party risks that their organizations have faced since the pandemic began.
Data stored on outside devices or somewhere that a company’s IT department cannot safeguard is problematic and open to a myriad of threats, such as phishing, malware, ransomware, and exploitation of vulnerabilities in cloud-based microservices, cryptocurrency, and mobile applications and devices.
The Growing Cost of Unsecure Data
The average cost of a data breach in 2021 was $4.24 million per incident, according to a report from IBM and the Ponemon Institute. What’s more, as per the same report, security breaches cost an average of over $1 million more per incident when they involve remote work.
Remote Work and the Risks of Data Loss and Data Leakage
The risk of data loss or damage increases with remote work due to employees using a range of devices and network gateways, storing data in multiple places, and accessing different versions or instances of the various applications they need to do their jobs.
Accordingly, IT teams must limit or reduce the risk of malicious activity and data loss through policies that limit accounts based on granular access for users, group permissions, locations, and devices, among other things.
2. Complying with Data Security Regulations
Industry standards and security regulation compliance also affect various businesses and managed service providers differently. Depending on the industry, IT departments must abide by certain rules or adhere to certain regulations in order to remain operational and avoid fines or other legal penalties.
For example, medical and healthcare organizations in the US must be compliant with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and the associated cybersecurity guidance that comes with it.
Other industries also need to consider various rules and regulations:
- Government organizations and companies that interact directly with governing bodies need to follow certain cybersecurity frameworks, such as the laws and regulations laid out by the US’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).
- Finance and financial services companies must comply with the standards set out by various regulatory bodies, such as the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), or face severe penalties.
- Healthcare organizations and medical providers need to comply with HIPAA regulations in the US and similar statutes in other countries.
- Manufacturers must often follow certain data privacy and security laws and regulations depending on their industry, location, and business activities.
The consequences of failing to comply with these standards or regulations vary by industry and infraction, but they include fines, potential lawsuits, and possible civil or criminal penalties for individuals at fault for the failures.
That’s not to mention the costs involved with mitigating or fixing the effects of the breach and the potential loss of trust in the eyes of the public.
3. Enabling Cybersecurity Measures for Remote Workforces
The clear demand for and need to enable remote work in 2022 and beyond means that IT teams must respond to many new challenges and requirements, such as adding enhanced encryption and security protocols like multi-factor authentication (MFA) and granular access control, and user policies.
Implementing Encryption Protocols and Multi-Factor Authentication
Any data that is password-protected, or applications that require a username and password for access, is still not as safe as it could be. Enter encryption protocols and MFA, which can help protect any company data that is accessed through any network.
Setting up these protocols—especially for remote workers, traveling, or otherwise accessing business applications and data from a network not maintained or controlled by the company’s IT department—is necessary in order to help safeguard company data.
Controlling Access on a Granular Basis
The ability to manage data access from a central location and provide it on an as-needed or user-by-user basis is a necessity for maintaining cybersecurity in today’s distributed business world.
IT teams must be able to restrict access based on classifications such as user, group, media access control (MAC) address, internet protocol (IP) address, and incoming gateway to keep sensitive information secure.
Securing Varied/BYOD Devices Across Multiple Locations
With team members often using their own devices (as well as taking home laptops and mobile phones for remote work), maintaining a secure environment has become more complex than ever.
There are additional layers of complexity to contend with for those companies that offer a bring your own device (BYOD) program. For example, employees likely have different makes and models of devices, and they may be running different OSs and versions of these systems.
Employees may also be accessing company servers or data over Wi-Fi networks that the company does not manage (e.g., those in their homes, airports, coffee shops, hotels, or other public facilities), which may not be secure.
In addition, some legacy applications may not be available natively on certain devices yet still can be critical for business operations. These applications may require virtualization technology for employees to access them remotely, which can require additional cybersecurity measures.
4. Mitigating the Strain on IT Resources
It’s abundantly clear that remote and hybrid work has increased the strain on IT departments. Since remote workers access and interact with company data from a range of locations using different devices and gateways, the number of potential access points for cybersecurity breaches has increased significantly.
Companies must take increasingly sophisticated and multi-pronged approaches to cybersecurity that involve layers of protection.
Ideally, an organization’s data security approach should be simple to manage and cost-effective, but 61% of IT professionals report their companies are understaffed, resulting in a resource gap that cybercriminals can readily exploit.
5. Keeping Pace with Ever-Evolving Cybersecurity Threats
Cybercriminals are moving targets. Accordingly, IT departments must handle a range of constantly changing cybersecurity challenges, such as malware infections, account hijackings, spam, targeted attacks, malicious scripts, phishing, and more.
Hackers and other bad actors are always seemingly ahead of the curve, so ensuring your company’s data security protocols are top-notch is essential, and it can be a major undertaking.
With a growing number of workers using mobile applications and the cloud, cybercriminals are adapting with new penetration tools, deep fake technology, and other cybercrime tactics that pose heightened cybersecurity challenges.
While companies can and should implement cybersecurity awareness training for employees, there are other measures that organizations can take to keep up with these evolving threats.
How to Protect Your Company from Cybersecurity Challenges in Hybrid Working
Making a long-term commitment to the hybrid workplace makes sense for many businesses. That means it’s a good idea to assess where your existing company arrangement works and what needs to change in order to safeguard your company and your employees no matter where they work. Here are some of the most important considerations when creating a new work order.
It begins with the creation of a cyber security policy and ensuring that everyone in the organization is properly briefed and onboard. So much of cybersecurity relies on people understanding how and where thieves might target them and what makes them and their devices vulnerable. It’s critical to teach your staff about the dangers and how to protect themselves, such as recognizing and responding correctly to social engineering and phishing efforts, creating strong passwords, physically safeguarding their devices, and more.
When it comes to picking the greatest cloud service provider, it’s equally critical to choose the top vendor. One such vendor is Parallels® RAS, which keeps you safe both remotely and on-site.
Overcome Cybersecurity Challenges with Parallels RAS
A virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) solution like Parallels RAS can help reinforce and enhance your company’s cybersecurity efforts whether employees are working remotely, on-site, or anywhere in between.
That’s because VDI solutions help centralize and protect your company’s data using multiple layers of security, such as Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) and Federal Information Processing Standards (FIPS) encryption protocols.
VDI solutions also enable company data to be stored on a central server or in the cloud (or both, if needed). This means that, instead of storing data on their device(s), employees can access and use company applications and data over a secure connection protected via a variety of encryption protocols and MFA.
With Parallels RAS, IT administrators can restrict access to sensitive resources based on user, group, MAD address, IP address, and incoming gateway. There’s also an option for granular filtering by user.
While Parallels RAS can boost your organization’s cybersecurity efforts in many ways, there are a couple of areas where this solution is particularly valuable:
Data Segregation and Centralized IT Management
Preventing data leaks requires implementing strict data segregation mechanisms. With Parallels RAS, setting up and managing data segregation is simple and easy.
The solution offers its own data segregation feature, which means there is no sharing of data, applications, and desktops between instances of a Parallels infrastructure.
With Parallels RAS, IT teams can manage user access by device and application, manage data segregation and secure data storage, and tackle threats to company cybersecurity from one centralized location, all of which help reduce the burden on IT resources.
This centralization also allows potential security breaches to be mitigated more quickly since IT teams have a single location from which protective measures can be deployed and user access restricted.
Advanced Filtering, Client Policies, and More
IT teams can use combinations of these capabilities to develop the appropriate multi-layered cybersecurity solutions for their needs. They can also set up client policies, which are a set of rules that define the limits of what users can configure or do on their own instances of company systems, such as:
- Downloading new applications.
- Accessing certain applications.
- Changing their desktop or workflow configurations.
- Copying and pasting data from one place to another.
With Parallels RAS, employees can access remote desktops or applications on any device or OS without any of that data being stored on the device itself. This helps ensure user flexibility and access without compromising data security.
IT teams can use Parallels RAS to manage data access from a single location and provide it on an as-needed or user-by-user basis. There are also options for restricting access based on factors like the user, group, MAC address, IP address, and incoming gateway.
Parallels RAS also offers the following security features:
- Kiosk mode, which transforms Windows machines into remote clients in order to increase security.
- Smart card authentication requires users who access the system to use a physical smart card with a personal identification number (PIN).
- Clipboard restrictions control if or where users can copy and paste items between applications.
- Security assertion markup language single sign-on (SAML SSO) authentication allows users to access multiple applications on the same company server via a single username and password.
- High-level data protection for corporate assets via integration with RADIUS, Deepnet, Gemalto (formerly SafeNet), smartcard authentication, Google Authenticator, and other time-based one-time password (TOTP) authenticators.
Together, the security features of Parallels RAS help mitigate the strain on IT bandwidth and cybersecurity resources. This is done by allowing teams to develop robust client policies and enforce them from one central location.
The result? A comprehensive solution to today’s myriad cybersecurity challenges so your company can continue to enable remote and hybrid workforces with greater peace of mind.
Check out all the security benefits Parallels RAS has to offer by watching our on-demand demo.
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