Remote Work Security Trends

Cisco recently released a global findings report on the importance of cybersecurity in a hybrid future of work – that is, remote work, with a future look at preparing for a post-pandemic world.

Here’s a summary of a few of the more interesting statistics when it comes to priorities, security challenges, tools adopted, etc.:

• Cybersecurity has become a top priority for organizations – 41% of respondents rate cybersecurity as more important than before the pandemic, while another 44% said it is extremely important.
• Seventy percent of medium organizations have experienced an increase of 25% or more in cyber threats or alerts. Industries that saw the greatest increase in threats or alerts include architecture and engineering, chemical engineering and manufacturing, and education.
• Secure access is the top cybersecurity challenge faced by organizations when supporting remote workers (62%).
• When it comes to prioritizing technology to support remote work, organizations ranked cybersecurity measures as the #1 priority (52%), followed by collaboration tools (41%).
• When it comes to actual technology adoption, collaboration tools (73%), cybersecurity measures (68%) and cloud-based document sharing (63%) were the top three most widely adopted solutions.
• The top challenges when it comes to enforcing cybersecurity faced by organizations include the lack of employee awareness/education (59%), too many solutions to manage (50%), inconsistent interfaces (35%) and lack of visibility (31%).

In a different study on the state of network security from Perimeter 81, they found that 61% of organizations cite protecting new devices as their greatest security concern during a time of remote work. Another 56% are primarily concerned with the lack of visibility into remote user activity.

When it comes to securely connecting to networks, 66% of organizations are using virtual private networks (VPNs), 58% are using a cloud service through a web browser, 48% are using a remote access solution, and 34% are using a firewall. More concerning is the 33% of respondents that are relying on passwords alone for authentication to gain access to systems.

Leveraging Automation in Your Remote Work Security Strategy

To summarize the statistics above, in this time of remote work, organizations are struggling with:

1. An overall increase in threats or alerts
2. Cybersecurity concerns around lack of employee awareness, solution sprawl, and lack of visibility
3. Ensuring secure access is one of the top security challenges that organizations face
4. Organizations need to secure their increasing reliance on cloud and collaboration tools, as well as the use of new devices

Prioritizing cybersecurity in an era of remote work needs to also align with your overall business objectives. Choosing automated solutions can help reduce total cost of ownership, consolidate the number of solutions you need to deploy and manage, while enabling your team to be more efficient and effective at security incident detection and response.

Blumira helps you automate your security operations for threat detection and response by:

• Reducing the noise of too many alerts and the stress of alert fatigue with pre-written detection rules that prioritize key suspicious activity and threats
• Consolidating incident detection and response into one platform that integrates widely across your technology stack, providing a single place to view alerts and monitor your environment
• Saving on operational costs by automating security operation center (SOC) workflows, including threat hunting, investigation and remediation
• Providing recommendations, documentation and pre-configured resources for easy log configuration, resulting in deeper visibility into operating systems, endpoint protection and remote access tools
• Easily integrating with remote access tools, VPNs, cloud, collaboration and productivity solutions and more to provide near real-time monitoring, detection and alerts of any anomalous activity, such as unauthorized login attempts for remote access security

Learn more about Blumira’s platform, and measure your current capabilities to identify any security gaps with our free checklist, Threat Detection & Response Assessment.