How to ensure business resiliency, user productivity and security
Many circumstances and compliance obligations require organisations to activate or rapidly extend remote access capabilities as part of a business continuity strategy. Beyond impacting user productivity, this emergency workplace shift can stress IT infrastructure and operations. With advanced planning, crises that require immediate, increased and varied remote access capacity should not increase threat exposure, cyberattack and data leakage risks.
Top Tips
Here are some important Secure Access Emergency Readiness tips to ensure business continuity, operational efficacy and protected accessibility.
Understand your remote access needs in terms of users, applications and resources in order to assess respective physical, virtual or user-based connection capacity and throughput.
Identify key applications and resources, whether on-premises or cloud, that will require increased capacity and apply to an emergency capacity plan.
Explore application and security tool license and capacity shifting options set in advance with your vendors to handle burst utilisation.
Review and maintain application, data and role mapping to ensure users only access the resources they need, and have processes in place to quickly respond to user or role escalation and ad hoc privileged access and revocation.
Consider virtual and cloud environment deployment and clientless mode to allow for more rapid on-demand deployment and scalability.
Establish Disaster Recovery (DR) sites to provide secure access services in case of a primary site outage or failure and explore Secure Access solutions’ DR options for active/active or active/ passive modes.
Build, publish and review emergency remote work guidelines, resources and communications.
Activate advanced secure access usability features for streamlined access, such as: always-on, per-application and simultaneous tunneling, configuration lock down, clientless operation and online portals.
Ensure emergency means to simulate on-premise access, including Layer-3 access to a specific subnet, HTML5 access to local machines, or Virtual Desktop Infrastructure by privileged users and technicians.
Enforce endpoint compliance policy and activate self-remediation capabilities to reduce phishing and ransomware threats introduced by increased remote users and potential vulnerable devices.
Invoke mobile device security options, such as mobile VPN, device security, segregating corporate apps and information, and data encryption to allow for broader for corporate and personal device use.
Utilise Adaptive Authentication and User Entity Behaviour Analytics (UEBA) to better understand and react to new user/device usage, as well as unwanted and anomalous activity.
Leverage usage analytics, bandwidth “throttling” and optimised gateway selection capabilities to better distribute workloads and to deliver “essential” applications to users without performance degradation.
In a world where natural and man-made disasters occur, we want to help keep your business running effectively and securely so you can focus on what’s really important – and keeping your employees, friends, and family safe. If and when these unplanned events and disasters intensifies, organisations must adjust for increased stay, connect and work from home mandates. Beyond impacting user productivity, this emergency workplace shift can stress IT infrastructure and operations.
Download the Pulse Secure Solution Brief
Download the Secure Remote Access Emergency Readiness Solution Brief here to get these important tips to ensure business resiliency, user productivity, and continued secure access.
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