Compliance

Meeting increasingly complex compliance obligations amid an expanding threat landscape and a widely dispersed workforce

Compliance

Meeting increasingly complex compliance obligations amid an expanding threat landscape
and a widely dispersed workforce

With the rise of the GDPR, the Cloud Act and a range of similar regulations, many organisations - particularly those operating in the legal, finance, and healthcare sectors - have found meeting their compliance obligations increasingly challenging. However, a critical element of operational resilience is the ability to adapt to unexpected shifts with minimal disruption. Nowhere is this truer than with organisations’ cyber security strategies, where a proactive approach to shifts in requirements ensures there are minimal disruptions in the event of change.

Cultivating a futureproof cyber
security ecosystem

Cyber security remains a critical compliance challenge for all organisations - one that has become significantly greater since remote working has resulted in a higher volume of sensitive data being transferred, and an increase in the number of different technologies used. In particular, requirements which must not be neglected as employees connect to the corporate network from a range of locations, including through personal devices.

There have already been a number of measures put in place to help organisations develop a robust cyber security posture, such as the Government’s ’10 Steps to Cyber Security’ guidelines, but there is still work to be done, as evinced by a 2021 Government cyber security report:

Only 18% of organisations surveyed specifically cover the use of personal devices and only 23% cover remote working within their cyber security policies.
31% of organisations include cyber security within their business continuity plans.
83% of organisations have up-to-date malware in place, and 78% have up-to-date firewalls - down from 2020 in both cases.

Developing a security-conscious workforce

With 46% of organisations having reported a cyber security breach in 2020, it is clear that security policies must evolve to reflect the evolving threat landscape, as part of the wider mission to minimise downtime, optimise the availability of business-critical applications, and maximise customer continuity. It is not enough to assume remote workers simply connect to a VPN, as this leaves too great a margin for human error and will not provide IT teams with visibility of the overall security ecosystem - a critical concern when employees are widely distributed and established security policies around data security in the office are no longer sufficient.

As a result, infrastructure must support consistent performance and security across all available channels. The combination of SD-WAN and SASE technology is an extremely attractive option in this regard, allowing corporate security policies to be automatically implemented at the edge, on a per user and per network basis, with patches or security updates applied automatically, regardless of where staff are connecting from.

Through this type of intelligent automation, IT teams enjoy the kind of control and visibility that would previously have only been achievable with exclusively on-premise infrastructure, plus the freedom to integrate additional security solutions, such as access control and multi-factor authentication, for further peace of mind.

With this in place, organisations are freed to focus on the cultural aspects of data security, making employees aware of the part they have to play, no matter where they are connecting to the corporate network from, and ensuring they feel confident reporting any concerns they have. This should be an ongoing process and treated as part of the wider effort to maintain employees’ productivity and wellbeing.

All this will offer customers peace of mind that their data will be secure, no matter how they prefer to make contact.