There is no doubt that remote work culture hit its media peak during the pandemic, and in the last 4-5 years, the demand for alternative work models has continued to grow among the global workforce.
In fact, between 2019-2021 only, the number of Americans working remotely grew from around 9 million to over 17.5 million1, resulting in a positive attitude among staff to work either remotely or within a hybrid model in the current landscape.
But what about maintaining the security of endpoint point devices and data from cyber threats? An increased focus on the endpoint is non-negotiable when protecting your business from hackers and data breaches!
More effective endpoint management can be key in delivering swift remote services to effectively manage systems remotely while employees work from anywhere.
These endpoint management solutions maintain the functionalities of endpoint systems to establish secure, stable IT services 24×7 to customers, employees, business partners, regulators, investors, and other constituents.
This blog will discuss the evolution and challenges of remote culture and how an automated endpoint management system can help businesses resolve such challenges. Continue reading!
Table of Contents
The Evolution of Remote Workspaces
In the past, physical office space was a key part of company culture. Employees had to commute to workspaces, which was costly and time-consuming and reduce work-life balance.
The mental and physical health of employees also suffered, leading to increased levels of work stress and burnout, which made it difficult to do the job effectively. It created an atmosphere that decreased employee productivity.
One of the most significant advantages of remote work is its flexibility. Remote workers can tailor their work schedules to better suit their individual preferences. This autonomy fosters a sense of empowerment to improve work-life balance, resulting in better productivity and boosting business revenue.
With the rise of remote work, many employees are now using their own devices for work purposes. This shift necessitates robust security policies to manage potential vulnerabilities and maintain security controls, especially when employees have administrative access to their own devices.
While the original benefit of remote work culture stemmed from the necessity of maintaining physical separation between workforce members, several studies have highlighted just how transformative alternative work structures can be. From productivity improvements to measurable mental health benefits, the list goes on!
Whether it’s because of investment tied up in commercial property leases, connection maintainability, or a desire to foster a sense of diverse community in the workplace, many companies plan to adopt remote office culture, at least partially.
This is reflected in recently released research by Litter2, where over 70% of US employers said they intend to embrace hybrid work models in 2024.
Typical Challenges in Remote Endpoint Management
When organizations and employees have embraced remote and hybrid work cultures, it has become a challenge to maintain collaboration and security of the endpoint devices.
You can understand it from the fact that with remote culture, several personal devices find their way into the office network, making organizations face security risks.
We have listed the top 5 remote work culture challenges that add to the complexity of remote workspace management:
1. Endpoint Device Diversity
As more personal devices—from laptops and cellphones to Internet of Things devices—are utilized for remote work, it becomes harder to maintain uniform security across all endpoints.
It is crucial to use services and tools to protect devices from cyber threats and attacks. Implementing measures to detect and block malicious activities can safeguard workstations, servers, and other devices, mitigating risks associated with the increasing number of connected devices.
- Workers may use public Wi-Fi or unprotected home networks that allow unauthorized users to access private information stored on unsecured devices.
- Remote workers access work-related materials on their devices, which makes them vulnerable to endpoint viruses, worms, or other harmful code.
2. Lack of User Awareness
Despite robust security tools, human error remains a significant factor in endpoint security incidents. These errors can have far-reaching consequences.
The common errors are mishandling sensitive information, falling for phishing scams, using weak passwords, misconfiguration security settings, and not following security protocols.
- Users unaware of online dangers make inappropriate security behaviors and become cyberattack targets. Employees tricked in phishing emails cause data breaches and cost organizations millions.
- Employees may bypass IT protocols to download unauthorized apps that cybercriminals may spoof or gain access to an executive or employee’s email account to impersonate that individual for fake invoices or more.
3. Compliance Management Issues
Complying with laws, regulations, or policies in remote cultures can be tedious unless an endpoint point management system is in-built. New rules and standards are constantly created, and security threats evolve with them. In remote systems, seeing the entire environment and identifying risks is difficult.
- Many workers use outdated systems and processes. Some employees don’t have clear ideas on compliance, making it difficult for organizations to enforce policy consistently across business units.
- Many employees don’t know how to keep their devices safe, and when working remotely, they make a mistake at the network configuration end.
4. Network Coverage Gap
Remote employees can experience a loss in network coverage, which prevents the IT team and software updates from reaching the device when needed. It is hard to detect unauthorized changes on offline devices.
Land topology, Software bugs, Distance from the base station, and Energy depletion usually cause network coverage gaps.
- Complex environments with network coverage gaps make coordination challenging. When problems arise, it can also be difficult for the organization’s security team to fix vulnerabilities, as they have limited control over troubleshooting.
- Remote employees spend more time fixing mistakes, which can waste resources and miss opportunities.
5. Shadow IT Risks
Employees may use unauthorized applications or services for convenience, unknowingly introducing security vulnerabilities and compliance breaches.
This usually compromises cloud security and leads to sensitive data leakage, which affects the company’s reputation. Organizations lacking visibility and control over a network and infrastructure open up numerous access points for malicious attackers to exploit.
- Unauthorized tools handle sensitive data, putting organizations at risk of violating data protection regulations and resulting in steep penalties and fines.
- Employees create new accounts to complete their work rather than have one assigned to them by the company, manipulating services in ways IT hasn’t prescribed.
How is Endpoint Management Coping with the Challenges of Remote Work?
Today, our understanding of employment has forever changed. Employees also value the advantages of working remotely, and company executives are reassured that in-person meetings would still be feasible when needed.
However, the highly exposed nature of today’s IT infrastructures requires an automated endpoint management platform. It is fundamental to transform IT functions from back-end operations to key services closely integrated with business success, compliance with internal security policies, and effective process execution.
And if it is an AI-powered endpoint management platform that leverages AI to improve employee experience and intelligently automate infrastructure management, it is a win-win situation!
An Endpoint Management system offers complete solutions for endpoint protection, securing and managing endpoints across operating systems, ensuring continuous compliance with industry benchmarks, and revolutionizing vulnerability management with cybersecurity analytics. It is the single solution to secure any endpoint in any cloud across any industry with a single, easy-to-use graphical user interface.
The core offerings offered by the AI-powered automated end-point management system are as follows:
Revolutionize Workspace and Unified Endpoint Management
An endpoint point management transforms how organizations manage their digital workspaces by leveraging Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies to elevate employees’ digital experience and automate infrastructures with seamless, secure, and AI-enabled intelligent management.
It unifies the management of workspace devices, servers, and cloud environments, offering a comprehensive and cohesive approach to workplace management. Enhance protection by consolidating endpoint security measures across diverse environments and reducing vulnerabilities.
- Organizations can simplify managing corporate-owned and BYOD devices by leveraging the world’s most extensive library of automation and a comprehensive, unified endpoint management (UEM) solution. It helps streamline operations and maximize efficiency. To protect an organization’s data, applications, networks, and devices from cyberattacks and unauthorized intrusions, it automatically schedules operating system updates and keeps software up to date.
- Gain visibility and control over your hardware and software inventory with reports to effectively manage your IT estate and make informed decisions around your software needs.
Achieve and Maintain Continuous Compliance
End-point management systems ensure adherence to regulations and standards in a remote setting by automating the deployment of endpoint security patches to reduce or fix vulnerabilities and maintain compliance without disrupting user productivity.
It achieves continuous compliance with regulatory requirements by leveraging compliance checks and industry standards and custom checklists for CSIA PCI DSS, DISA STIG, and others.
- Uses unconventional industry checklists to automatically restore non-compliant endpoints to a compliant state. Ensure continuous compliance with constant low-impact monitoring that protects your endpoints against cybersecurity threats and provides near-real-time compliance reporting.
- Discover, prioritize, and mitigate critical security vulnerabilities using threat sources from MITRE and vulnerability scan data from Tenable, Rapid7, Qualys, and others.
Remote Desktop Control
The endpoint management system facilitates seamless access and support for remote workstations by providing remote discovery and analysis of applications installed on endpoints.
With its remote desktop control, businesses manage and access end devices from anywhere with an internet connection, while its administrators establish role-based access to support different user responsibilities and lines of business requirements.
- Shrinks deployment and migration time with fully automated operations including remote wake-up support and deployment scheduling.
- Puts real-time endpoint information at administrators’ fingertips with remote diagnostics capabilities that simplify and streamline help-desk calls and problem resolution.
Remote Device Discovery
Identify all devices connected to the network and improve end-point security by helping IT and Security Ops discover, prioritize, and remediate vulnerabilities quickly. This effectively reduces the attack surface and mitigates insider threats.
It leverages threat intelligence feeds from various sources, the ATTACK knowledge base, and known exploited vulnerabilities published by CISA, and organizations more aggressively reducing vectors of attack.
- Simulate the impact of remediating specific vulnerabilities on the enterprise attack surface using entity behavior analytics to minimize associated business disruptions and mitigate the most significant security threats.
- Utilize Protection Level Agreements to compare remediation and patching activities to predetermined goals established by IT operations and business stakeholders.
Server Automation
An endpoint management platform helps manage physical, virtual, and remote servers while lowering operational costs with real-time management. It streamlines server management tasks for greater efficiency and reliability.
Seamless physical and virtual server management from a single interface helps improve visibility and control of all endpoints and easily deploy and manage servers across heterogeneous platforms using either pre-built or custom automation.
- It delivers real-time visibility and control for all servers and provides seamless physical and virtual server management, such as clustered server OS patching, from a simple interface.
- It supports task sequencing with standard tooling that can be used for critical tasks like server builds, such as deploying operating systems, configuring settings, and deploying software.
Conclusion
Managing workstations, servers, and roaming devices presents IT organizations with a formidable challenge, but endpoint management software provides IT and Security Operations with powerful tools to align their efforts to manage endpoints. It simplifies management processes, enhances endpoint control, and centralizes views using a single interface.
With an endpoint management system, the IT Ops team simulates remediation actions focusing on the highest-exposure endpoint threats.
Businesses can use these management tools to supercharge their effectiveness while taking a more active role in enterprise security by defining and measuring their performance against agreed-to business objectives. You can check the endpoint demo now.
