FeatureWe should aim for a context-aware cybersecurity strategy where work from home should be morphed into work from anywhere with higher secured digital assets.
Everyone is aware about the global rapid growth and advancement of technology, which has been at an unimaginable rate over the past decade. This year has had an equal contribution, if not more, for majority of the sectors in the IT field, leading towards further and greater innovation.
The Covid-19 pandemic brought different opportunities and challenges for the IT industry to advance, adapt and innovate. With a new way of living and mandatory work from home policies, IT firms had to reimagine the workplace and create new business strategies.
The IT industry in the Middle East has been successful in terms of digital transformation, advancement of technology and tools, educating people and boosting talent – addressing the changing environments and staying competitive.
In 2020, majority of the firms implemented a mandatory work from home policy and there was a sudden shift to home networks, creating higher than usual risks for breaches and threats.
For cybersecurity firms, the key objective was to support organisations with securing their workforces and protecting their information, without disrupting business operations. Palo Alto Networks has been successful in terms of creating unique strategies targeted to different customers and end users.
The pandemic caused cyberattacks across the globe based around a single theme, and that was a big challenge. Until end of March 2020, there were over 40,000 new Covid-19 related websites classified as high risk, as per Palo Alto Networks’ Threat Intelligence Team, Unit 42.
From targeting home routers and other IoT devices, compromising home networks to phishing links, cybercriminals always find new ways to attack. A recent attack was website mimicking domains of major brands including Netflix, Amazon, Facebook, and Apple to scam consumers.
New attacks that consumers are not aware of can be challenging, and as a rule, we always advise not to visit unknown websites and links and avoid sharing your confidential data on public platforms. Also, enterprises and business leaders, with the help of their security teams and boards, must look at new ways to secure their organisations’ digital environment.
With the high rise of digital transformation, the product Prisma Access has been extremely beneficial for our customers, in terms of transforming onto cloud and scaling your remote workforce. It offers the same security functionality as Palo Alto Networks’ next generation firewalls, but without the need to deploy new infrastructure.
So instead of multiple point products, which has been the standard approach, Prisma Access enables secure access, protects users and applications, and controls data – from anywhere. This is particularly useful for companies around the globe when it comes to working from home.
Learning from lessons based on recent events is valuable, but lessons are most impactful when we can apply them toward what is next. We should aim for a modernised, context-aware cybersecurity strategy where work from home should be morphed into work from anywhere with higher secured digital assets. We need a more systematic way of monitoring for events and incidents, along with users and all connected devices.
Enterprises are now moving from a cloud-first to a cloud-only strategy as no organisation will have the luxury to put off a cloud-centric cybersecurity strategy. Also, automation must become a core principle of cybersecurity defense – this helps utilise the time and budget of security experts on more tedious tasks.
