By Peter Newton, Senior Director of Products and Solutions, IoT and OT, Fortinet

For many employees, the traditional workplace has evolved over the past 20+ years into today’s work-from-anywhere (WFA) environment. And recently, this evolution, with a boost from 2020’s global pandemic shutdowns, has accelerated at breakneck speed.

While IT leadership is desperately trying to provide consistent support and protection for their WFA people, there’s never been a more opportune time for cybercriminals to take advantage of the new challenges, vulnerabilities, and expansion of the attack surface. Evidence of the increase in cyberattacks can be found in a recent global survey commissioned by Fortinet for a WFA study.

The new report reveals that 62% of respondents indicated their organizations experienced a security breach during the past two to three years that could be at least partially attributed to an employee working remotely.

The Cybersecurity Mesh Platform

Supporting a hybrid workforce that works from multiple locations puts a significant amount of pressure and responsibility on networking and security teams. The onus is on them to upgrade legacy technologies like VPN with more advanced solutions that improve both WFA cybersecurity and the user experience.

It is almost impossible to secure a WFA environment using non-compatible endpoint protection, EDR, identity, and firewall solutions from multiple vendors. One of the best-advanced solutions that organizations can deploy to protect their WFA employees is a cybersecurity mesh platform from one vendor that delivers endpoint, network, and remote access security.

Five Other Advanced Technologies for Today’s WFA

1. Endpoint Protection

Because people often take their company-issued laptops and connect to the organization’s network via unsecured public access points, endpoint protection is a necessity.

CISOs and IT teams require an endpoint detection and response (EDR) solution that combines cloud-based artificial intelligence with automated playbooks to keep devices and their associated employees productive and secure.

2. Application Access Control

IT cybersecurity teams require a zero-trust network access (ZTNA) solution that acts as an access policy engine and controls access to applications and more. This technology provides appropriate access for employees based on user and device identity, location, device type, and posture to establish secure access.

3. Cloud-Based Cybersecurity Services

A cloud-based cybersecurity service such as secure access service edge (SASE) is ideal for protecting WFA staff—whether they’re working from a hotel room, a train station, a restaurant, or their home. EDR and ZTNA solutions can secure the endpoint and control application access, but access to the internet should be protected by a cloud-based secure web gateway (SWG) and Firewall-as-a-Service (FWaaS) services for secure connectivity from different locales.

4. Authentication Tools

Identity and access management (IAM) tools are also important to successfully protecting WFA employees when they are working off-site. These types of tools enable the quick and proper authentication of users with multi-factor authentication (MFA) when combined with identity services.

WFA Requires Cybersecurity Everywhere

Protecting employees as they glide between offices, homes, coffee shops, airports, and everywhere in between has always been a challenge for IT teams—especially as attacks have increased on WFA workers.