5 steps for ensuring secure remote access

The mode of self-isolation showed that many companies can transfer employees to remote work without loss of efficiency, and heads thought of reducing costs for lease and providing offices. According to poll of the Centre for Strategic Research (CSR) Business climate, more than 60% of employers are going to save the remote mode for a part of employees, 5% — for all workers. The issue of a possibility of complete or partial transition to remote work and at the level of the legislation is handled. At the beginning of June, 2020 [1] the relevant bill was introduced to the State Duma.

Information security specialists sound the alarm, the mode of remote work bears big risks in terms of security of corporate networks. Since the beginning of year growth of number of cyber attacks in Russia was 85%, their quantity exceeded 180 thousand incidents. The majority fell on the period of introduction of the mode of self-isolation. On average the large organization at the successful attack of hackers loses 860 thousand rubles.

What tasks need to be carried out for the organization of secure remote access?

Before introduction of the mode of self-isolation some companies provided partial remote access for employees. In 2020 when remote work became a mainstream, services for remote connection to corporate network demanded serious completion, including in information security field.

For the organization of the protected remote access to corporate network STEP LOGIC recommends:

1. Provide the protected VPN connection

Basic method of the organization of safe data transmission – VPN. For protection of VPN connections of the company the software client installed on the remote device can be also required. The VPN client will allow to solve some more different problems of cybersecurity: identification/authentication, secure access, conformity assessment, etc. In that case load of the equipment and administrators will be much lower, than when using several different solutions.

2. Make sure of authenticity of the employee who is connected to corporate network

Use multifactor authentication (MFA). At an input in network the technology requests from the user the second factor for authentication (through push-notifications, tokens, the SMS, certificates or mobile codes) which it is impossible neither to pick up, nor to change.

3. Check security of the connected device

Before admission to resources of the company control new network connections and check the remote device for compliance to security policies using the solution of the class NAC. The technology allows to create a quarantine zone in which it is possible to set necessary means of protecting and politicians, to check the device for existence of relevant security updates of OS or an antivirus.

4. Reveal and block the attacks on the gateway

Modern Next Generation Firewall (NGFW) devices have broad functionality of identification and blocking of the attacks, abnormal activity and malware. Use modules of an intrusion prevention and protection against malware and unknown threats for inspection of traffic of remote users.

5. Control actions of users

Solutions for control of actions of privileged users (PAM) will help to avoid financial losses as a result of leakage of confidential data. Also PAM can keep track of activity of all remote users, including also the contractors having access to corporate network. The solution keeps the detailed magazine of actions of employees 24/7, performs record of sessions and automatically notifies on suspicious activity.

What to begin with?

Check security of your service for remote access from cyberthreats Experts of STEP LOGIC developed the test for assessment of security of service of remote work. According to the results of testing you receive personal recommendations about increased security.

Learn to configure quickly protected remote access on online workshop Under the leadership of Alexey Lukatsky you learn how to organize service of secure remote access, solving laboratory works on Cisco AnyConnect, ISE and AMP in dCloud service.

Order free express assessment of external perimeter on existence of vulnerabilities Fill out the request, and we will send you the report on vulnerabilities on perimeter of the company and the recommendation about their elimination.

Take one or several solutions of Cisco in the test The firewall of new generation Cisco Firepower, the solution for the organization of the Cisco AnyConnect VPN tunnels, the system of protection against the malware and unknown threats of Cisco AMP, the solution for access control to corporate network taking into account Cisco ISE context are available to testing.