INTELLIGENT BRANDS // Cloud
Cybersecurity’s future is
in the cloud
Cybersecurity is a key concern for many as more people work
from home during the pandemic. Kanaiya Vasani, Executive Vice
President, Products and Corporate Development at Infoblox,
explains how cloud-based security services could be the solution
to many companies’ problems.
The world is ‘social distancing’ as we
try to halt the spread of the novel
Coronavirus, and it’s no longer a
global experiment in working from home
– it’s our new reality. We know that the
‘normal’ world that we return to will be
dramatically different from the one we left.
But the question on everyone’s mind right
now is: What exactly will be different?
But, as we’ve noted before, VPNs are only
a partial solution. VPNs can only provide
security when they are used to connect
directly to a company’s internal network.
These days, more and more companies
are using cloud-based applications like
Office365, Google Cloud and SFDC to get
work done from home. And since many
users are accessing these applications via
the wider Internet and not through a VPN
connected to the corporate network, they
remain vulnerable to these cyberthreats.
Furthermore, VPNs rely on existing onpremises
security infrastructure, which can
be difficult to scale up and may not work as
well with large numbers of remote workers.
I read an article in the Wall Street Journal
that tried to forecast some of the changes
that this pandemic is accelerating in the
world of cybersecurity. In brief, it’s going to
be cloudy.
“The pivot to working from home highlights
the benefits of cloud-based services that
CYBERSECURITY
IN PARTICULAR
QUICKLY ROSE
TO THE TOP OF
EVERYONE’S LIST
OF CONCERNS AS
BAD ACTORS TOOK
ADVANTAGE OF
FEARS OF COVID-19.
Kanaiya Vasani, Executive Vice President,
Products and Corporate Development
at Infoblox
can quickly scale up defences around
decentralised employees,” they wrote.
The overnight shift to near universal work
from home status has challenged even
the largest organisations. Everything from
network infrastructure to the devices that
we use for work, to our assurances that users
and corporate data remained safe and
secure, has had to be re-thought on the fly.
Cybersecurity in particular quickly rose
to the top of everyone’s list of concerns
as bad actors took advantage of fears of
COVID-19 for phishing campaigns and
other cyberattacks. Many turned to VPNs in
response, establishing private connections
between users and the corporate network to
encrypt and protect sensitive data.
As the Wall Street Journal article indicates
and we at Infoblox believe: “Short-term
spending to keep workforces up and running
will likely veer toward the cloud as the
economy recovers and executives plan for a
more remote-friendly future.”
Cloud-based security services make it easy
to scale and add new users and devices
and aren’t reliant on physical infrastructure
to keep users safe. In fact, they can often
be deployed without any new physical
infrastructure at all.
Since some 90% of malware uses DNS in
some way, using a DNS security solution that
can detect malware and other cyberthreats
is one of the best and most cost-effective
ways that companies can secure a large and
distributed workforce.
At Infoblox, we recommend that organisations
secure their employees and enterprise assets
with cloud-based DNS security solutions that
provide a ubiquitous layer of security for
teleworking employees, no matter where they
set up their remote offices. •
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