Endpoint Protection And Management In This Telecommuting World

For a long time, network admins have been lacking enough time to spend in their efforts to maintain international endpoint security configurations, settings, and patching. With most of their companies’ workers connecting remotely nowadays, the above-mentioned has become a trickier task than before.

When end-users leave the relatively safe confines of their physical offices, they would be exposed to all sorts of security issues. They are perhaps connecting to corporate networks with their devices. Besides, they might not be prioritizing acting as per IT policies as much as possible.

Perhaps they are browsing the internet during their downtime hours, or maybe their children are playing with their devices, driving the employer-maintained endpoint devices to new, possibly dangerous sites. Those are a few of the latest complications that IT admins encounter when it comes to end-users. It would be more complex if you think about how extensive remote connectivity affects network performance.

Even in less-than-ideal situations, IT teams should discover productive endpoint management applications and then implement these. The coronavirus-enforced new normal may continue to exist long after this pandemic goes away. The ways in which people work and interact have radically changed. So, network administrators do not have any other choice than adapting.

Issues With Working Remote

Several technology companies have permitted some level of telecommuting in the recent past. Anyhow, organizations are not facing the situation of having to permit select staff members to telecommute for some days a week. Those kinds of scenarios arise less commonly than people might generally think.

As per a Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) survey from 2019, only 7% of American employees had access to telework. The individuals who had the right to use it were usually in managerial roles. That means it is uncommon for many different organizations to have a situation where their workforces simultaneously connect to corporate networks from distant locations. Organizations failed to build an infrastructure with those kinds of situations in mind.

Consequently, a multitude of problems is emerging. For instance, when hurriedly equipping staff for telework, companies have issued laptops with no security standard or software installed on them. Therefore, numerous vulnerabilities are likely to be on a worker’s residential network, and their IT admins are overwhelmed with requests originating from those end users situated in a fresh working setting.

The administrators cannot just briefly visit workstations to know what is going on. Rather, they are forced to think about things such as whether a worker’s endpoint devices are set up properly or every endpoint got the latest security patches. The considerations must also include the following.

• Whether the right security settings are applied.
• Configuration Manager clients are set up properly on the devices and are functioning correctly.
• In what ways the systems are working.

Today’s admins are trying to figure out the above-mentioned and more, from their remote settings through a VPN.

In a usual situation, endpoint management programs deliver updates and patches on a successfully arranged schedule, to keep these apps from affecting network performance and business operations. Anyhow, the above software additions are likely to take considerably longer to come through virtual private networks and workers’ residential networks. Some are likely to go undelivered. Due to the considerable strain of distributing content through a VPN, several machines are no longer frequently maintained, whereas updates and software patches are not issued. This makes networks exposed to external threats.

Cybercriminals

Enterprise networks also encounter fresh security threats due to the common telework practices mentioned earlier in this blog. Those threats can add to not only an enterprise’s pain but also its financial loss at an increasingly rapid rate.

Cybercriminals know the IT problems that the coronavirus pandemic has exposed. Besides, they know that endpoint devices perhaps lack those updates or patches. The situation of machines not being set up properly does not bother cybercriminals. Being in this new normal situation is a dream for anyone keen on taking advantage of vulnerabilities.

So, what measures can an enterprise take against cybercrime?

The best countermeasure that network admins can take, is executing automated endpoint management application health changes. That said, it is important to deliver those checks in a smooth and continuous way without affecting the VPN. Companies cannot afford a security breach. Similarly, they can ill afford to adversely affect production traffic through the kinds of inspections and content distribution processes that take up much bandwidth and time.

Automate To Protect Your Remote Team

Use the best-automated software to confirm that those headaches are fixed. Fortunately, there are intelligent software programs that find, diagnose, and fix issues fast, in a way that causes no network strain. There are cloud solutions characterized by innovation that can allow secure content delivery at an amazing scale and pace, with just a reliable internet connection. Those solutions can facilitate that through split-tunnel architectures of VPNs, thereby enabling endpoint devices to obtain content straight from a CDN or alternative internet-facing systems.

The solutions mentioned above allow responding quickly to security vulnerabilities and security violations, patrolling and enforcing configuration management policies, and, maintaining Windows OS health all for enterprises. Those also aid in reducing the help desk call count, accelerating resolution, and keeping software programs working and healthy.

It is a possibly dicey idea to deploy a new software solution amid an epidemic. Hence, enterprises have to be wary of certain things about that solution’s deployment. Firstly, the purchaser has to be sure that it allows doing only the things its maker claims. Any vendor has to make references available on request. Secondly, implementing that solution should be easy and quick. IT professionals no longer want to see an additional challenge coming their way. Thus, your enterprise would have to adopt that new solution only if it simplifies IT people’s work without asking them to invest more time in it.

Further, the solution has to reduce the effects on end-users to prevent complaints arising from the latter. Last but not least, businesses have to seek solutions that create easily understandable reports showing endpoint device activity at any particular time through health checks.

Considering the aforementioned factors will allow organizations to mitigate certain negative consequences of changing to a team of telecommuters. Reducing the above can cause the workforce to be more efficient and secure right now and down the road.