Remote Working Made Safer Using Access Gateway

The COVID-19 pandemic has forced many organizations to adapt to a new reality where much of the staff have to work from home. This poses significant challenges because the existing VPNs the companies had in place were not designed to handle a sudden explosion of remote workers. With infrastructure becoming expensive it’s a good opportunity to have remote access with zero trust architecture to provide a safe and secure remote working environment for employees. Many organizations that had been reluctant in moving towards remote access were found to be completely unprepared to tackle the sudden lockdown, which negatively impacted their businesses. To overcome situations like these, different business units, project groups, partners, contractors and guests require secure and different levels of remote access and often require a user experience tailored to employees unique requirements and devices. Mobile devices and Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) present additional challenges in providing on-demand connections in a manner that keeps data secure in the corporate network and limits exposure. But with just remote access there also comes the vulnerability of an opportune moment for the hackers to execute cyber-attacks and gain access to sensitive data of commercial value.

“The increasing global spike in the number of phishing emails from last few months is not new to anyone. These have been indicating a serious and targeted attempt to exploit the anxiety related to the pandemic. Remote access in combination with zero trust is the perfect solution to counter such threats. With Array’s Network ADC, SSL VPN and WAF solutions, organizations will be at an advantage. This combined with zero trust – a security concept centered on the belief that organizations should not automatically trust anything inside or outside its perimeters and instead must verify anything and everything trying to connect before granting access gives organizations an edge like never before.” said Shibu Paul, Vice President – International Sales at Array Networks.

Array’s secure remote access solutions provide greater levels of security, a greater range of access methods, a broader range of device support and the ability to provide differentiated, identity-based access tailored to the needs of multiple communities of interest. Besides, with Array’s secure mobile access solution, sensitive data remains protected on the enterprise network and is accessible anytime, anywhere, so BYOD becomes an advantage rather than a threat to security. Mitigating risks associated with business continuity events and realizing gains through higher employee productivity are driving increased demand for remote access. While traditional VPNs are well suited for giving remote access to employees they are not as adept at supporting office workers. Remote access can be cost-effectively scaled for as many workers as needed even from a single appliance. It’s not just employees, even third-party vendors who work remotely have the advantage of being under the protection of Array’s remote access solutions. What’s more, because data never leaves the network, security is assured.

The Covid-19 situation has led to a significant rise in phishing attacks and social engineering scams. Threat actors are using Covid-19 themes to trick users into clicking on malicious links that spread ransomware, harvest credentials and so on and to fight these threats organizations need rigid security measures. They need to keep in mind that a zero trust framework cannot be implemented without a secure tool for remote access. Zero trust has many benefits when combined with remote access. It can help organizations cut back on complexity, reduce its attack surface, and increase visibility for auditing and compliance. There are a few best practices when configuring remote access within a zero trust framework like strict authentication rules, restrict authorization and auditing. The zero trust architecture is similar to one-to-one segmentation and helps in preventing DDoS attack, server scanning, application exploits, man-in-the-middle attacks and SQL injection.

It is all the more important now to have a network security model that verifies the user for the organization at every step of the way and all the time. With the combination of remote access and zero trust, organizations find an answer to the security concerns during the pandemic times.