Smart working has forcefully entered the working reality of employees and organizations in recent weeks, and the pandemic condition we find ourselves in is an accomplice to this strong acceleration. For some companies, it was not a novelty but rather to face the growing demands in terms of resources that this way of working requires, while for others, it was a race against time to ensure good business continuity.
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In a similar context, corporate security is a fundamental asset, which must be reconsidered precisely because smart working does not use exclusively corporate resources. The endpoint is, in fact, geographically located at the employee’s home, and the connection between this location and the company infrastructure will hardly be created through a dedicated connection: it is much cheaper to use the home internet connection, however implementing a VPN connection.
Why is a VPN connection meaningful? In ordinary working conditions, the individual workstations are located within the organization’s perimeter; therefore, the connection of the single endpoint with a server or other company resource takes place using a monitored connection, which can be considered safe.
The same does not happen in the context of smart working; by exploiting a public connection, the assumption of security is lost. Public networks can be a valid solution for personal use. We cannot say the same for professional services in which information and confidential details are shared between devices. With a VPN connection, this connection is made more secure.
A VPN -Virtual Private Network- connection requires that the single remote endpoint has a client through which it can forward a connection request to a server that will verify the credentials of the remote terminal and activate a secure connection. From then on, all data traffic between the client and server will be encrypted.
The virtual tunnel created through cryptographic technologies will offer reasonable security against “man in the middle” and sniffing attacks that could potentially be implemented in the stretch of public infrastructure. When data re-enter the corporate network infrastructure, it will be protected by local resources and policies.
The setup of a similar infrastructure is not indifferent and requires skills and partners capable of offering organizations the necessary resources. It is a job that requires installing and configuring the VPN client on each machine, monitoring the resources used on the server side, and foreseeing any upgrades at the corporate infrastructure level. It must be considered that all traffic from the endpoints will be forwarded to the corporate network, which will have a star topology (or balanced tree) and must be suitably sized to meet the growing needs of smart working.
Using a VPN for the secure connection of individual workstations also requires a minimum of training from your employees, who will have to understand its basic operation to avoid unnecessary requests for IT support with the inevitable loss of productivity.
The adoption of these technologies offers companies a good opportunity for savings through the use of a public network. These saved resources could be reinvested in other security sectors because, it should be clarified, the VPN connection represents a single link in the security chain and should be understood as a partial solution to the problem.
The VPN connection, in addition to all the other best practices relating to corporate security, is an element that is part of a broader and more organic concept of cyber-security and must be duly implemented in peacetime. Finally, we mention a figure provided by IDC and relating to the next five years, for which an annual increase in the use of VPN solutions of more than 11% is expected. Further confirmation of how much smart working and, more generally, the need for secure access (VPN) to company resources will grow shortly. Therefore, it is important to consider this when planning investments in the medium term.
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