How to Handle The Four Major Endpoint Security Challenges During Work-From-Home

What four major endpoint security challenges can you expect during the work-from-home era? How can you handle them, mitigate them, or otherwise prevent them?

Previously, enterprises could tackle major endpoint security challenges through straightforward solutions. However, the work-from-home era—the direct result of the coronavirus outbreak—complicates these challenges. The challenges your enterprise faces shifts in response to the everyday security problems of the day. 

Here’s what we mean.

Four Major Endpoint Security Challenges During Work-From-Home

1. Unsecured Wi-Fi Connections

Previously, enterprises faced a unique problem when dealing with remote workforces. Some workers would work from public Wi-Fi connections, such as at cafes. These proved a significant challenge to business cybersecurity; hackers can easily take advantage of the weak security of public Wi-Fi to intercept correspondences. 

However, the coronavirus means the vast majority of workers now work-from-home. Of course, this poses its own major endpoint security challenges, as home private networks can suffer from the same vulnerabilities. 

Regardless, your enterprise might need to enact a virtual private network (VPN). A VPN can enact the same level of security as a corporate, secured Wi-Fi connection even for home networks. Also, VPNs ensure that correspondences and sensitive data moving between networks remain encrypted until they reach the designated recipient. 

2. Lack of Visibility Over Data

Of the major endpoint security challenges during the work-from-home era, data loss proves the most worrying. Employees could access data and transfer it without the strict visibility maintained by in-network cybersecurity. For example, employees could upload sensitive data to a public cloud database—which proves a serious vulnerability. Hackers could easily steal this information, or a simple misconfiguration could leave the data open. 

Thankfully, next-generation endpoint security provides Data Loss Prevention (DLP). This prevents unauthorized users from transferring data to unsafe locations or locations without visibility. Moreover, it prevents moving data to unsecured databases. 

It offers reassurance in a time when there are so few reassurances. 

3. Scaled IT Environment

Work-from-home as a model invites so many more devices than the typical enterprise might encounter. For example, enterprise firewalls can’t provide visibility or security control over the cloud; this could result in unauthorized cloud access, data leaks, or accidental disclosures.

On the other hand, the plethora of mobile devices now connecting to enterprise networks require new perimeter security measures. Next-generation endpoint security helps find and extend cybersecurity protections to devices as they connect to the network and to sensitive databases. This visibility also prevents mobile devices from becoming gateways into the network and allowing hackers lateral movement.  

4. Email Security and Malware Prevention at Scale

According to the Verizon 2019 Data Breach Investigations Report, 94 percent of malware attacks come from email attacks. This includes phishing attacks, which now pose as coronavirus-related messages; unfortunately, phishing attacks pose a high success rate. Without the right endpoint security with email protections, these emails can prove difficult to distinguish from genuine messages   

Moreover, plenty of malware threats persist even during the coronavirus; hackers take advantage of the chaos to enact their attacks and strategies. So next-generation endpoint security helps by enacting strong antivirus. It can block malicious websites, stopping emails from unwanted domains from opening, and blacklisting suspicious applications from installing. 

How to Learn More

Check out our Endpoint Security Buyer’s Guide for more as well as details on the top vendors and their key capabilities.