Fortinet research demonstrates enterprises must adapt to address telework security challenges long-term

John Maddison, EVP of Products and CMO at Fortinet: “The COVID-19 pandemic will have lasting effects on how organisations invest in cyber security. In fact, over 90% of enterprises plan to invest more to secure telework over the next two years. Given a dramatically expanded digital attack surface, the waves of cyber threats targeting remote workers, and the ongoing cyber skills gap, organisations need to carefully consider what technologies and approaches are needed to secure their telework strategies long-term. They have an opportunity to maximise their investments with cyber security platforms designed to provide comprehensive visibility and protection across the entire digital infrastructure, including networked, application, multi-cloud and mobile environments. This ongoing shift to remote work will also require more than just technology; cyber security training and awareness should also remain key priorities.”

News summary

Fortinet (NASDAQ: FTNT), a global leader in broad, integrated and automated cyber security solutions, today unveiled the 2020 Remote Workforce Cybersecurity Report.

• The report investigates the cyber security challenges that organisations faced as a result of the dramatic shift to telework early this year and the planned investments to secure remote work in 2020 and beyond.
• This report is based on a survey conducted in June 2020. Participants are employed in 17 different countries, representing nearly all industries and the public sector.
• For a detailed view of the report, as well as some important takeaways, read the blog. Highlights of the report follow.

The sudden shift to telework was challenging for most organisations

• As the COVID-19 pandemic spread rapidly in the first half of 2020, many organisations were required to shift to telework practically overnight as teams around the globe were asked to stay home. Nearly two-thirds of the firms surveyed had to rapidly transition over half of their workforce to telework. In addition, most respondents said the rapid change presented a challenge to their organisation, with 83% citing it as moderately, very, or extremely challenging. Only 3% were not at all challenged.
• In addition, the evolving remote work environment, increased reliance on personal device usage, and overall influx of workers outside the corporate network opened an opportunity for unprecedented cyber threat activity. From opportunistic phishers to scheming nation-state actors, cyber adversaries found multiple ways to exploit the global pandemic for their benefit at enormous scale as evidenced by a recent FortiGuard Labs Global Threat Landscape Report. Threats included phishing and business e-mail compromise schemes, nation-state backed campaigns, and ransomware attacks. In fact, 60% of organisations revealed an increase in cyber security breach attempts during the transition to remote work, while 34% reported actual breaches in their networks.
• With a spike in employees remotely connecting to the corporate network, an increase in breach attempts and overall cyber attacks, organisations cited the most challenging aspects of this transition as ensuring secure connections, business continuity and access to business-critical applications.
• At the time of the survey, enterprises had already invested in key technologies as a result of the pandemic. Nearly half of organisations invested further in VPN and cloud security, while nearly 40% invested further in skilled IT professionals or network access control (NAC).

There is still room for improvement: Almost all enterprises will invest more in secure telework

Given the number of attempted breaches and overall waves of cyber threats targeting remote workers, organisations need to carefully consider what technologies and approaches are needed to secure telework moving forward. Defence strategies need to be adjusted to fully account for the extension of the network perimeter into the home.

• As of June this year, a long-term shift to telework is anticipated, with nearly 30% of organisations expecting more than half of their employees to continue working remotely full time after the pandemic.
• Almost all organisations expect to invest more to secure telework long-term, with nearly 60% of enterprises spending more than $250 000 in secure telework investments in the next 24 months.
• Moving forward, the majority of enterprises surveyed intend to make unplanned upgrades to their existing systems to secure telework. Many also plan to add new technologies not previously in place.
• Only 40% of organisations had a business continuity plan in place prior to the pandemic. Yet, as a result of the pandemic and the rapid shift to remote work, 32% invested further in this area.

While organisations have made improvements in securing their remote workforces since the beginning of the pandemic, survey data reveals several areas that could be considered opportunities for improving secure remote connectivity.

These areas include:

• Multi-factor authentication (MFA) – The survey revealed that 65% of organisations had VPN solutions in place pre-pandemic, but only 37% of organisations had multi-factor authentication (MFA). While VPNs play an important role in ensuring secure connectivity, they are simply one part of securing access. Therefore, if not already in place, it is recommended that organisations consider integrating MFA into their remote security plans.
  
  
• Endpoint security and network access control (NAC) – Seventy-six percent and 72% of organisations plan to either upgrade or adopt NAC or endpoint detection and response (EDR) solutions respectively. As employees work remotely, organisations face challenges to control the influx of non-trusted devices on their networks to enable remote work, creating new security challenges overnight. By adopting NAC solutions, IT teams get increased visibility and control over the users and devices on their network. EDR solutions deliver advanced, real-time threat protection for endpoints both pre- and post-infection.

• Software-defined wide-area networking (SD-WAN) for the home: Sixty-four percent of organisations plan to either upgrade or adopt SD-WAN, but specifically for the home office. The critical advantage of extending secure SD-WAN functionality to individual teleworkers, especially super users, is that they can enjoy on-demand remote access as well as dynamically scalable performance regardless of their local network availability.
  
• Secure access service edge (SASE) – Seventeen percent of organisations made investments in SASE prior to the pandemic, and 16% invested in SASE as a result of the pandemic. Still, 58% plan to invest in SASE to some degree going forward. Although SASE is an emerging enterprise strategy, it is increasingly seen as an opportunity to combine network and security functions with WAN capabilities to support the dynamic, secure access needs of today’s organisations.

• Skilled security professionals – At the start of the pandemic, only 55% of organisations had enough skilled IT workers in place to support the shift to remote work. And while 73% of organisations stated their intention to invest further in skilled IT workers in the next 24 months, the historical lack of skilled IT security professionals could present a challenge.

Additional resources

• Read our blog for valuable takeaways from this research or access the full report.
• Read more about how Fortinet customers are maintaining business continuity at scale with integrated and secure Fortinet Teleworker solutions.
• Find out how the Fortinet Security Fabric platform delivers broad, integrated, and automated protection across an organisation’s entire digital infrastructure.
• Learn more about FortiGuard Labs threat intelligence and research and the FortiGuard Security Subscriptions and Services portfolio.
• Learn more about Fortinet’s Network Security Expert (NSE) Training Institute, including its free cybersecurity training initiative, the NSE Certification Program, Security Academy Program and Veterans Program.
• Read more about how Fortinet customers are securing their organisations with Fortinet.

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