With the COVID-19 outbreak quickly spreading to all parts of the country, many American businesses have implemented remote work possibilities for their staff for the first time. The shift from staff working at a physical location to working remotely is a long-term trend that will continue even after the threat of the coronavirus has been contained. Therefore, it’s more important now than ever before to develop strategies to manage and deal with insider risk in your organization. Despite the clear benefits of evolving to a remote work structure, there are also serious challenges that your insider risk management program needs to adapt to in order to protect your critical data. Here are some key areas that deserve a special focus.
Awareness
With the absence of a physical space, many of the insider risk concerns focusing on raising awareness within a company culture need to evolve and take on the perspective of the virtual space. There needs to be a clear emphasis on the methods through which employees access sensitive corporate information, especially if that information is being accessed on a public network. The proper handling of information outside of the office should also be touched on. The insider population should be understood from the lens of virtual access instead of those with physical access. And workflows need to incorporate methods that are meant to determine and identify aberrant behavior within the remote, digital workplace.
Understanding
In a perimeter-less workspace, it is understood that the insider holds the assets in a variety of different methods and devices. The home office, in today’s interconnected age, can comprise several different IoT devices – PCs, tablets, smartphones, USB storage – each of these different types of devices needs to be accounted for in a company’s risk model. In addition, when critical data needs to be transported from one place to another, remote workers will tend to have different means of transmitting and delivering that data than those in a physical office location with standardized operating procedures. Therefore, it’s imperative to catalog inter-office workflows and analyze them carefully in order to fully understand the vulnerabilities of your remote work environment.
Visibility
With the increased focus on personal devices in the remote workspace, novel methods must be devised to create visibility within your organization. Developing workflows that track the transmission of data outside of a corporate-controlled network is crucial in this regard. You may need to limit the kinds of devices your staff use in order to have a working level of monitoring. To counter the loss of visibility into staff behavior, open source information will prove invaluable. This information may include data from financial records, law enforcement, and social media posts. When utilized well, open source information is a critical tool in helping your team recognize early warning signs of possible insider risk.
Protection
A remote workplace requires persistent, data-centric encryption that goes further than the typical end point and authentication protocols. This ensures that your security team will be equipped to properly manage insider risk by giving your team the ability to encrypt any digital asset across any source application, OS, or format. The key terms to learn here that maximize security in the remote workplace – persistent (meaning data encryption is enforced constantly), top-down policy enforcement (allowing for universal, cohesive corporate policies), and granular (allowing for security encryption to be deployed at the lowest level possible).
Contact ITMG to Develop Strategies and Protocols Designed to Help Your Company Mitigate Your Insider Risk
ITMG is an industry leader in helping organizations throughout the United States strengthen their insider risk management programs and secure sensitive data. Our team of bona fide experts has the real-world experience necessary to plan out and create holistic security solutions tailored to the special needs and risks in your industry. Contact ITMG today to learn more about how we can help! You can also visit our Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn pages for more updates and insights into the world of insider risk management.