Orgs Balancing Hybrid IT Access, Security to Increasingly Mobile Workforce

Many enterprises must balance easier consumer-like hybrid IT access to an increasingly mobile and flexible workforce while protecting their brands, intellectual property and the sensitive information of their customers and employees.

The “2019 State of Enterprise Secure Access Report” from San Jose, Calif-based Pulse Secure, which provides secure access solutions, focused on the threats, gaps and investment as organizations face increasing hybrid IT access challenges.

“IT is more complex than ever today as organizations accelerate digital transformation and broadly adopt public and private cloud infrastructure,” the report reads. The study also suggested, “this has led to a need for increased visibility and oversight as the network perimeter becomes more porous and elastic.”

According to the report, the shift in how organizations deliver hybrid IT services to enable digital transformation must also take into consideration empowering a mobile workforce, supporting consumer and IoT devices in the workplace and meeting data privacy compliance obligations – all make for a challenging environment to ensure, monitor and audit access security.

While enterprises are taking advantage of cloud computing, the survey data showed all enterprises have ongoing data center dependencies. One fifth of respondents anticipated lowering their data center investment, while more than 40% indicated a material increase in private and public cloud investment.

Key findings for the financial industry include:

• Forty-two percent of respondents preferred data center and private cloud as their IT delivery model.
• Application unavailability, outages and unauthorized data access and data leakage had a higher relative impact on organizations than in other organizations.
• The top secure access priorities included refining privileged user or service account-based.
• They use 2.6 secure access tools in their environment.

Scott Gordon, chief marketing officer at Pulse Secure, said. “The key takeaway from this report is hybrid IT delivery has expanded security risks and necessitates more stringent access requirements. As such, organizations should re-assess their secure access priorities, capabilities and technology as part of their Zero Trust strategy.”

A Zero Trust Architecture, also known as Zero Trust Network or Zero Trust, refers to requiring stringent identity verification for each individual and device trying to access a network.

“What was consistent across enterprise sizes, sectors, or location was that secure access for hybrid IT is a current and growing concern with cyberthreats, requirements and issues emerging from many sources. The reporting findings and insights should empower corporate leadership and IT security professionals to re-think how their organizations are protecting resources and sensitive data as they migrate to the cloud,” Martin Veitch, editorial director at IDG Connect, which conducted the independent research for the report, said.

The survey also found the most impactful incidents stemming from a lack of user and device access visibility and lax endpoint, authentication and authorization access controls. Over the last 18 months, half of all companies dealt with malware, unauthorized/vulnerable endpoint use and mobile or web apps exposures. Nearly half experienced unauthorized access to data and resources due to insecure endpoints and privileged users, as well as unauthorized application access due to poor authentication or encryption controls.

While a third expressed significant confidence, 61% of respondents indicated modest confidence in their security processes, human resources, intelligence and tools to mitigate access security threats. The survey revealed the top access threat mitigation deficiencies: defining app, data and resource access and protection requirements; defining, implementing and enforcing user and device access policy; and provisioning, monitoring and enforcing BYOD and IoT device access.

The majority of survey participants identified hybrid IT application availability; user, device and mobile discovery and exposures; weak device configuration compliance; and inconsistent or incomplete enforcement as their largest operational gaps for access security. Correspondingly, participants indicated their organizations, improving endpoint security and remediation prior to access (48%); enhancing IoT discovery, isolation and access control (46%); and fortifying network and cloud access visibility and resource segmentation (44%).

Survey respondents, included more than 300 information security decision makers, in which 36% came come from the financial industry, in enterprises with more than 1,000 employees across U.S., U.K. and DACH (Germany, Austria, and Switzerland).