The global COVID 19 pandemic changed a lot of things in the world of networked technology. The popular online meeting platform Zoom saw an increase in meeting participants of 2900% during the pandemic. Other online meeting platforms as well as remote access applications and services also so a precipitous increase in users, and while the growth has tapered off, it looks like remote users are here to stay.
As someone who has organically grown into the world of online meetings, it has indeed been fraught with challenges, however today it works so well the majority of the time that we now find it odd when it does not work. This is a major change from the early days of web based voice and video communication.
One thing is always true when enterprising technologists are working to develop and deploy a new technology is that the first issue is getting it to work reliably as expected. Despite all the modern day discussions about security needing to be baked in from the beginning, the focus is and always will be getting things to work. Real security always seems to come later.
Okay, so here we are. Remote access works. Now organizations are facing true security challenges and they need to be addressed in real time. A recent article in The Globe and Mail titled “With remote work bringing more people online, there’s now a cybersecurity crisis” ominously speaks of organizations now having to deal with these challenges as they continue to mount. We knew it was going to happen, so it really is no surprise.
What this does do is create new opportunities for creators of security products and services to serve this very specific growing need. In 2021 Fortinet and Linksys teamed up to create a home networking device that bridges the home and enterprise which they call HomeWRK. Basically it combines the rather ubiquitous home networking routers with enterprise level management.
Okay, so that is definitely a good start, however we definitely need to take this a step further. Enterprise organizations can no longer count on tightening up their corporate security as an adequate way to prevent security breaches. As the global pandemic has shown us, cleaning up your own house is not going to stop you from getting sick, unless you isolate yourself from the outside world 100%. All it takes is one exposure to an infection and you carry it into your home, and the same holds true for any enterprise network that has incoming and outgoing connections to other networks, and today that is basically unavoidable. It is of absolute importance that an enterprise is not only aware of vulnerabilities that can affect their own networks, but they must also be aware of what vulnerabilities affect those who connect to them, and who they connect to. It seems reasonable to query these networked colleagues and partners to determine if they, for example, as using some sort of digital certificate based authentication, or zero trust networking architecture, as we discussed in our previous blog post “Don’t Trust…But Verify“, and to whatever extent the law permits, scan for potential vulnerabilities and request that these partners provide you with evidence that these networks have been checked for vulnerabilities and infections. At a global level, despite the controversy it caused, we were indeed able to do this to help curb COVID 19, so it seems that this would indeed be a reasonable time to start doing this in the networked world.