Impact of COVID-19
Meanwhile working from home is part of the new everyday life for many office workers. Cloud services are more requested than ever before. An impressive example of this is Microsoft: In a blog post, the IT company revealed that Microsoft Teams has seen a 775 percent increase in monthly users in Italy.
Such dramatic shifts in enterprise traffic patterns have impacts on the performance and security: VPN infrastructures have difficulties with handling the surge in remote employees. Legacy data and network security solutions are breaking. A recent survey conducted by Tripwire & Dimensional Research found that:
“ 81% of cyber security professionals say compliance has become more difficult because of COVID-19. 89% say working from home makes it harder to do a great job at security and 63% have already experienced COVID-19 related attacks (e.g. ransomware, phishing, and social engineering and the likes)."
Cloud native applications like Office365 are delivered through the cloud, yet many organizations use a legacy hub-and-spoke network architecture to force their employees to go through security appliances in their data center. We must keep in mind, that employees will do whatever is easiest and fastest. They simply want to turn on their laptop, connect to their Wi-Fi and access applications in the cloud directly, without hair-pinning through a choked enterprise backhaul network.
Risk exposure is increasing by the day
Companies are forced to keep the business running. In the shortest possible time, they must ensure that the employees can work from home. In this mad rush many companies are not doing the security-related due diligence required for using cloud services like O365 and Salesforce.
Source: Information Risk Insights Study - Cyentia Institute & Advisen Ltd. https://www.cyentia.com/iris/
The figure shows breach rates among the fortune 1000 organizations over a rolling one-year window. Overall the annual likelihood of any firm on the list having a breach is about 24 percent. The traditional threats like compromised customer data, diminished brand and reputation, loss of investor and consumer confidence and loyalty, stolen sensitive intellectual property, compliance and regulatory sanctions, business disruptions are still there.
Companies are doing their best to adopt a comprehensive security posture in a very short time. But as we all know there are always gaps. The recent rapid adoption of cloud services triggered by Covid-19 will only increase this risk exposure.
How can you securely adopt public cloud service of your choice?
In reality, no one can stop hackers or malicious insiders from stealing data. That is why organizations need to make sure, even in the worst-case scenario of data loss or theft, that no one can misuse their data. The only way to achieve this is through selective tokenization or encryption of critical data. Once the data is tokenized or encrypted before it reaches the public cloud, your organization is exempted from the threats listed above. Even if the data is compromised it is not readable for hackers and therefore useless. All you need to do is to maintain a geographically distributed backup for quick recovery.
eperi supports organizations in these challenging times: With our free test “Check your Cloud Security” you can find out where your company has security gaps. In addition, our experts will provide valuable tips on how to increase your IT-security.
As a further supporting measure, eperi has joined the initiative of the IT Security Association Germany (TeleTrusT) and currently provides free IT security solutions. We offer our eperi Gateway to companies with 100 users or more free of charge. The patented security solution enables the protection of data in the cloud, such as Office365, Salesforce, SAP SuccessFactors or on-prem systems.
How can eperi support you in these challenging times?
About the author:
Abhishek Das
Vice President Customer Success
eperi GmbH
