The Importance of Endpoint Protection for the Remote Work Paradigm and How IBM MaaS360 Can Make a Difference?

The year 2020 bought in a drastic change in the way organizations operated. Many companies were forced to pull down their shutters due to the inability to work amid a crisis.

Yes, this has been the scenario since the pandemic hit us. Though the impact of this tough time has been wavering across the last two years, businesses are continuing to grapple and survive.

However, like a silver lining in the cloud, several organizations have taken the plunge into augmenting their remote workforce. A few others have begun to maintain a hybrid workforce that includes a mix of remote and office-going workers. While this is undoubtedly a relief for companies to continue work virtually, this paradigm shift to the remote environment comes with its caveats. One such challenge is to ensure cybersecurity.

Cybersecurity is a vexing concern even in a well-monitored office. When employees start to work from home, they tend to use personal devices like laptops, mobile phones, and computers to accomplish their everyday tasks. This paves the way to vulnerabilities and the risks of data compromises increase multi-fold.

This is where endpoint security can help tremendously.

Let’s understand this concept in detail.

What Is Endpoint Security and Why Is It Important in a Remote Working Environment?

Endpoint security is the practice of securing end-points or entry points to a network. These can be laptops, computers, or mobile devices used by the end-users to connect to the network.

The endpoint security solution protects these end-points from being exploited by malicious users and from falling prey to cyber threats.

It is important especially for companies maintaining a remote workforce to focus on endpoint security because cybercriminals are constantly devising new ways to infiltrate networks and steal sensitive information. When your employees connect over public networks through unprotected devices, the chances of critical data being exposed increases thereby enabling the hackers to gain access into your network.

Cybersecurity challenges posed by endpoint devices include:

1. Unsecured Wireless Access Points

According to this study, 77% of remote employees use unmanaged/unsecured personal devices to access critical business information.

The hard truth is that public networks lack encryption and encourage a stampede of cyber threats. When remote employees connect over these public networks or home-based private networks, the chances of emerging vulnerabilities increase therefore making it easy for unauthorized users to gain access to the network and also to sensitive information.

2. Data Breaches

Remote work includes sharing critical information over open networks. When business-critical information is transferred or uploaded on the cloud without in-network cybersecurity, the chances of this data being misconfigured and stolen is higher, thereby resulting in a data breach.

This survey report says that amongst the participating companies, nearly 80% of them experienced a cloud data breach in the past 18months.

3. IoT Incursions

Though the Internet of Things (IoT) has leveraged the way companies operate, it has also given way to security incursions through hardware, software, cloud, and enterprise networks. This research shows that there is a 21% increase in the enterprise and automotive IoT market that approximately totals 5.8 billion endpoints.

Considering the huge number of IoT endpoints, they may also be potential targets if used in the absence of standard IT security protocols.

How Can IBM MaaS360 Help?

Remote employees have begun to handle numerous applications across their organizations. In this competitive landscape, data is valued as currency. Not just smartphones or tablets but even laptops, desktops, IoT, and non-standard devices can be managed like their mobile counterparts. Unified Endpoint Management (UEM) platform coupled with AI-driven threat intelligence and remediation can effectively drive any endpoint security conversation.

IBM security MaaS360 comes with a SaaS-based comprehensive unified endpoint management (UEM) solution. This platform enables you to secure endpoints, applications, content, and data.

Furthermore, this solution includes mobile threat defense and identity-as-a-service along with multifactor authentication.

The IBM security MaaS360 encompasses the following mobile security solutions.

a. Mobile Device Management (MDM)

Mobile Device Management solutions offer API-based policy, same-day support for operating systems, and compliance rules to name a few. This proves to be the basis of UEM deployment. Though UEM solutions may deliver a rich set of security and productivity tools for devices, this may not prove effectual if not enrolled and managed at a basic level. Therefore, MDM solution is pivotal to leverage UEM solutions.

b. Enterprise Mobility Management (EMM)

Enterprise Mobility Management focuses on user experience and data security. In MaaS360, EMM features involve the secure container. This container is an encrypted sandbox that is installed on user devices with workplace applications. It also includes identity tools and mobile application management policies for corporate applications.

c. Bring Your Own Device (BYOD)

BYOD policy enables employees to access information from anywhere across the globe. It supports the use of personal laptops, tablets, smartphones, and wearables. This policy helps employees to be mobile.

BYOD also supports the deployment of native containers to developer features like user enrolment and Android enterprise.

d. Unified Endpoint Management (UEM)

UEM solutions offer a single point of solution across various device types. It supports mobile threat defense, artificial intelligence insights, single sign-on, and conditional access to name a few. UEM aims at providing a robust risk management strategy without impacting employee productivity.

Benefits of IBM MaaS360

The benefits of IBM MaaS360 are the following:

- Helps Conduct Real-Time AI-Driven Risk Assessments

This compendium of solutions offers deep insights into the various risks that may impact your enrolled devices and users in the organization. MaaS360 helps further by developing a constantly updating risk score for each enrolled user.

- Allows to Safeguard Your Business-Critical Data and Applications with Container Policy

The concept of containment plays a cardinal role to strike the right balance between user productivity and corporate data protection. IBM MaaS360 has the appropriate container app for anything from data loss prevention (DLP) or setting up an enterprise application.

- Enables Improve Responsiveness with Mobile Threat Defense

IBM Security MaaS360 Mobile Threat Management helps detect and remediate malware from suspicious sources. To add on, in partnership with mobile threat defense provider Wandera, these capabilities are deepened by defending against phishing, man-in-the-middle, crypto-jacking, and other network/content-based threats.

Wrap Up

Undoubtedly, companies are still just beginning to get used to the remote working ecosystem. You may have inhibitions about data security and the risks of cyber threats.

When you adopt a state-of-the-art solution like the IBM MaaS360, you can rest assured that all your data-related risks are completely taken charge of.