During Cybersecurity Awareness Month, SecurID will highlight insights and best practices to help all businesses and users do their part to protect themselves, secure remote work, and “#BeCyberSmart.”
‘Cybersecurity First‘ means making security a business priority—from the tools you use and the data you protect to the people and processes you support. And the best way to keep your organization safe now, and every week of the year, is to start with a solid foundation of identity security.
Cybersecurity has always emphasized identity access and management, but identity security is shifting closer to the center of the security universe because one of the most critical points of vulnerability today is a workforce that is frequently connecting to critical resources from points far beyond the traditional corporate perimeter.
Workforce security has moved into the spotlight over the last few years of personal and professional upheaval. While we’ll eventually see a return to most aspects of pre-pandemic life, one major change is here to stay: the mainstreaming of remote work and of hybrid work that takes place both onsite and elsewhere. According to a recent Upwork survey, more than one in four Americans will be working remotely this year. Compare that to 2018, when only 7% of U.S. employees were given the option to work from home. To meet this new reality, employers are doing everything from overhauling previously restrictive remote work to announcing permanent, widespread work-from-home operations.
With some combination of remote and onsite work rapidly becoming the norm for many white-collar workers, employers must contend with the needs and expectations of their new hybrid workforce. That means fast, convenient 24/7 access to the data and applications they need to get their jobs done—from wherever they are, onsite or remote, and on any device. And to make that access a reality while protecting company and customer data, organizations need to step up their security.
The new hybrid workplace presents new challenges. In particular, the need to provide remote access to sensitive data makes cybersecurity an even more pressing issue. In a recent Deloitte survey, 79% of respondents reported that cybersecurity is on their board’s agenda at least quarterly. Many expect to make significant investments in cybersecurity systems and infrastructure to support the hybrid workforce.
In a dynamic access environment encompassing both on-premises and cloud interfaces, with employees and vendors working both in and out of the office, managing user identity and access can be difficult—and expensive. Add in shifting compliance requirements, and the pressure to streamline how your organization secures identities, prioritizes risks and maintains compliance becomes urgent. To meet the challenge, you need a robust identity platform that delivers identity security while maintaining flexible and frictionless user access.
As you develop a strategy for securing your hybrid workforce, you’ll need to address three main aspects of access management:
- Securing access for a hybrid workforce that’s equally likely to be at home, on the road or onsite
- Making access to cloud-based resources as secure as access to onsite data
- Keeping access convenient, to maintain a positive user experience while minimizing the IT support burden
With hybrid work the norm, it’s time to put identity and access management front and center. SecurID is the identity management platform that empowers your hybrid workforce without compromising security or convenience. SecurID gives you:
- Plenty of authentication choices. A range of hardware, software and mobile authentication options let you deliver the same level of secure, convenient access to remote and onsite users, using any technology platform, in the cloud or on-premises.
- Best practices for granting access. When you’ve got people connecting to resources from multiple locations via multiple access points, applying the principle of least privilege becomes more important than ever. SecurID can help as you institute best practices for granting privileges to new accounts and conduct privilege audits of existing accounts.
- MFA for secure, convenient access. To secure access to data, applications and resources, onsite and in the cloud, SecurID multi-factor authentication (MFA) offers a full complement of modern authentication methods, including secure, convenient passwordless authentication.
- Strong governance. With today’s complex, constantly changing workforce, knowing who has access to what at any time is more critical than ever. SecurID’s centralized authentication and credential management platform gives you dynamic application access control, key for identity governance.
SecurID delivers robust capabilities for both advanced, risk-based multi-factor MFA and identity governance and administration (IGA) to deliver secure, convenient access to dynamic hybrid workforces.
As we wrap up Cybersecurity Awareness Month, consider how well you manage identity across your hybrid workforce, both on-premises and in the cloud. SecurID combines the widest possible array of flexible MFA options with dynamic, risk-driven access policies. SecurID Governance & Lifecycle Cloud helps organizations better manage user access—putting cybersecurity first and reducing identity risk.
