Securing Remote Network Access for Business Continuity in Times Of Crisis: A Guide

Globally, the pandemic forced businesses to provide remote access to their employees. This access was being granted under pressure keeping to tight time constraints. On the contrary, one’s overwhelmed trying to keep up with challenging deadlines with risks and concerns. Thereby, leading to inevitable mistakes and misconfigurations that gave free rein to threat actors globally.

In one four-month period, around 907,000 spam messages, 737 incidents related to malware and 48,000 malicious URLs were detected (Interpol). 90% of businesses surveyed by Tanium claimed to have experienced an increase in cyberattacks due to the pandemic. Likewise, 93%,of the respondents had to delay key security projects to work on the transition to remote work (Security Boulevard).

Consequently, potential outages increased because networks were overwhelmed by increased traffic and surges in demand. Businesses pay higher premium to secure remote access and showcase network resilience especially during natural crisis. Business continuity has never been more vital.

The Battle Plan

For every organization emerging from the pandemic, business continuity is likely to be a key concern and the need for network resilience has risen in line with this. The realisation companies need to prepare for disruptions has never been more apparent. They need a plan that enables them to recover quickly. The current crisis may have focused minds within networking teams and senior leadership to carry out risk analysis and put measures in place to reduce those risks. Above all, a new approach which is simply beyond adding redundancy or even improving uptime to add a layer of intelligence is essential. Preferably, an effective resilience quotient to the network’s plan B.

For organizations that need to ensure they don’t square back to their present state, network resilience is key. Network resilience is the ability to withstand and recover from a disruption of service. One way of measuring it is how quickly the business can get up and running again at normal capacity following an outage. True network resilience is not just about providing resilience to a single piece of equipment whether that be a router or a switch, it is a solution that allows businesses to plug into their critical assets at any given point in time, from any given location. Remotely, a quick system reboot requires access to critical assets and data.

Alternative Arrangements

A strong backup is recommend for a business in case remote reboot does not function. A solution that enables them to quickly get back to “business-as-usual” from a remote site. There are many ways for your business to create backups of important data, and you should use multiple methods to ensure your files are always available when needed. Therefore, your business needs a backup solution that provides maximum ease of use and compatibility across all the mediums and platforms that you need and use.

Why Prevention Is Better than Cure

Businesses the world over have become increasingly aware of the critical nature of time. When crisis strikes, or a network outage occurs, the damage is cumulative. Businesses need to proactively plan and ensure that they are putting in place network resilience as a preventive rather than a reactive strategy. Often, organisations deferred the conversation around network resilience based on the optimistic hope that a network outage never happened. Finally, organisations are coming in to terms as the recent pandemic have put priorities in perspective. Indeed, network resilience is built into the network from the outset.

Networks are the ‘backbone’ to almost every organization’s operations, and many businesses will benefit from bringing network resilience into the heart of their approach from the outset.

Do you want to read more on this topic? Check out these articles:

• Security Must-Dos for CIOs in 2021
• Building A Human Firewall – Increasing Your Organization’s Cyber Resilience During the Pandemic
• Security
• Cyber Deception Technology that Help Thwart Targeted Phishing Attacks
• Business Continuity Planning Amid COVID-19 and Extended Employee Absence