The visibility challenges to supporting remote work

February 15, 2022

Emad Fahmy, Systems Engineering Manager, Middle East, at NETSCOUT discusses the visibility challenges to supporting remote work

Today’s enterprises continue to adjust IT and security resources in response to changes brought by the pandemic. Enterprises are now faced with the reality that 65% of pandemic-era remote workers want to continue working from home – and 58% say they will look for a new job if their company requires returning to the office.

As enterprise security and IT teams continue to grapple with changes in the network necessary to support remote access, they increasingly turn to the edge to do so. Edge computing provides a common abstraction across a range of local and remote IT assets in order to support next generation security and management technology. Moving resources to the edge enables data to be more quickly processed, analysed, filtered and stored, reducing both network latency and operational expense. However, for all of the benefits that edge computing creates for enterprises, it also opens them to new security risks.

As enterprises have had to expand services and rely more heavily on the edge, attackers have expanded the threat landscape, as well as the size and scope of their attacks. In the first half of 2021, attackers launched 5.4 million distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, an 11% increase from the same period a year earlier.

It’s no surprise, then, that security concerns are on the minds of enterprise IT and security teams that are relying upon the edge. The UAE is working hard to build a safe digital economy with highly secure and robust cloud infrastructure and also collaborating with several countries to shore up its digital ecosystem.

The biggest concerns are the expanded attack surface and greater exposure to threats like DDoS campaigns, data theft and intrusions into the enterprise network.

As more activity is moved to the edge, it’s important for CIOs and CISOs to ensure their teams understand the associated security challenges, while also ensuring that the end-user experience isn’t impacted by the policies and procedures put into place to do so.

Impact of Edge on CIOs & CISOs

The call for better collaboration, communication and consistency between security and IT teams is not a new one. But explosive growth in cyberattacks since the beginning of the pandemic have added additional pressure.

Now more than ever, it’s vital for security and network operations teams to have consistent goals, unified processes and interoperable technologies that protect the network, while also maintaining network uptime and performance for business operations. Doing so reduces costs through shared instrumentation, training, and operational efficiencies.

Challenges that must be addressed to protect the edge

It’s difficult to get an accurate status of network security because networking and security teams maintain separate tools and reports. Security teams largely view network security through network traffic analysis (NTA) and network detection and response (NDR) tools, while networking teams use various tools to manage devices, traffic flows, and network performance.

To read more exclusive features and latest news please see our Q4 issue here.