Remote Workforce: How to Protect Yourself From Emerging Threats?

Hello, my name is Paul Fisher. I'm a senior analyst at KuppingerCole and I'll be joined by Anil Bhandari, who's chief mentor with our sponsors today Arcon. And as you can see, we'll be talking of what's that something that's pretty pretty on our minds at the moment, remote working and how to protect ourselves from emerging threats. And that's pretty much the theme of the webinar today, but before we get going, just a few housekeeping, we have some KClive events coming up very soon.

In fact, one is tomorrow, that is the three fundamentals to enterprise identity success. And that runs from 12:00 PM, 6:00 PM central European time. And you can find all the details on our website and how to register as registration is free. Then we have on September 15th, identity governance and administration and next-generation access, which is another almost all day event, 10:00 AM to 4:00 PM central European time. And in looking into October, we have IGA solutions for service now, infrastructures, which again, runs from 10:00 AM to 4:00 PM central European time.

As I said, all the details are on our website. As for today, you are muted centrally, so you don't need to do anything. We are recording the webinar and the slides, and this will be available very quickly after today. And we will provide the slide decks for download as well. And of course, there will be a question and answer session at the end. If you wish to answer, ask a question, please just jot it down into the chat box, which you'll see on the right-hand side of your screen or the left-hand side, depending on how you've got it set up. And then we'll look at those right at the end.

So what are we talking about? I am going to be looking at how cyber criminals and others have taken advantage of the recent pandemic or the crisis that has envelop the whole world and how they're using it to target remote access users. And then auto from our con chief mentor. We'll explain how to use some modern tools to make secure, to make remote access more secure, and then we'll take some Q and a. So I'm going to just start off then with a look at the business and security landscape.

And this is a slide that I often say I use to talk about what's happening to business, but I'm not going to talk about everything that's on there. And just going to drill down a little bit into the things that are pertinent to what we're talking about today and of course, cloud, and is number one.

The, the thing that we're talking about when we talk about remote access, when we pretty much mean that either people are using the cloud or a cloud to access the tools and services that they're used to use, or they may be accessing stuff in the cloud itself, either way, the usage of cloud as probably are accelerated in the last six months as we were overnight, almost forced to change the whole way of working. We all know about people no longer go into offices. How people at home suddenly have to use their laptop that they might share with the family.

And they also found that because of the urgency to keep working, that it was a case of let's get connected, let's get stuff done and worry about security afterwards. The problem with that is that you, you can't keep delaying security and you can't think about not securing access because as it seems, we're now six to eight months from when the pandemic started. And most of us in most of the industrialized world, right across the United States, Europe, India, China, Asia, we're all still pretty much working in a kind of pandemic mode. And most people are still working at home.

But the other thing that that's happened is that it it's made companies and businesses realize that actually remote access works quite well. And many, many organizations are thinking, well, we don't need so many people in the office. It's actually more efficient and people are starting to like the work-life balance that it gives them not everyone, of course. And so we're probably seeing more of a mixture in the future as well when this pandemic is finally over, but it does mean that remote access will become a prime business process in, in the post COVID world and that's likely to stay.

And we'll like to see that remote access will become a lot more sophisticated. We we've kind of been lucky in that the pandemic happened when we already had a lot of tools available, such as zoom office 365 cloud working, all those kinds of collaboration tools.

And, but what we haven't done is really secured them so that we found that people were using VPNs that perhaps weren't secure, or they weren't even using a VPN. They were just logging in. Now they're still using the same passwords that they might've used in the office.

Part of the, this was also ongoing was vendor access that organization's infrastructures have become much more extended and they become extended further because now as I am doing right now, I'm working for my company KuppingerCole, but I'm working from home and extended that organization simply by the fact that I'm using an end point here in London and increasingly vendors or third parties are being seen as necessary to get business done and to foster innovation and to increase efficiency throughout the supply chain.

So vendors are also being, bringing it brought into this remote access mix and collaborative working again is something which has really gone from being something that people sort of talked about as a good idea, as, as something that people are really, really doing. Now, the fact that they are at home and not there in office has somehow made people be more collaborative. They're more open to file sharing. They're more open to video sharing and working on documents together. The problem again, is a cost that all of those things do open some vulnerabilities that need addressing.

So the security processes that have become more important with the way that we've changed working our security management, endpoint protection, secure remote access and auditing and reporting because whilst the world has changed and there's been some leeway from auditor's and compliance organizations, it doesn't mean that companies can no longer think that. Sorry, it doesn't mean that companies can think they no longer need to worry about compliance and fines if they lose data because they do. And that isn't going to change.

And a year from now, when we have settled down, hopefully the various regulatory bodies around the world will be expecting organizations to have formalized their remote working processes to make sure that they don't leave it open, leave themselves open to attack as much as possible by cybercriminals. So there's a, a, an overview of the businesses security landscape that is existing right now with particular emphasis on how remote access has changed.

So the here are really just a list of the kind of things that happened when we had this sudden shift to if not 100%, but pretty close to 100% remote working from, for, for many organizations or organizations, certainly at the start of this pandemic. But we had a kind of emergency mode, as I said, that managers or line managers, CEOs, they're not talking to you in a panic mode, but they were an emergency mode. And it was a case of let's keep the lights on, let's get the job done. And then we'll work around that in Hawaii.

And that kind of worked a lot of organizations realize that they could get the job done and tools like zoom proved to be very, very useful in that regard. The problem was that people were using unsecured home wifi, and it's true that most wifi routers are not set up or configured as they should be many, still have the factory set password, which is easily hackable in a dark web. And also people were doing things like public zoom conferencing. So they would publicize a zoom conference on social networks, which were open to all sorts of people.

Then they found that strangers would join those, those zoom conferencing either just to, to eavesdrop or even just for malicious purposes, they were using weak VPNs or none at all. And on premises access, only something, there was always going to be people that, that said that they could never work from home and they have to be in the office, but it's been shown that we have to become remote, whether they liked it or not. The other side of that is that people in their home environment perhaps feel a little bit more secure than the they should.

They have perhaps a false sense of security and hackers and others and cyber criminals that are aware of this. And they know that people under stress or people that need to get a job done, a move honorable to phishing attacks, where they might get an email suggesting that they pay some invoice or some other item that needs serious attention. And they click on a link and then introduce malware into the organization.

So these that's something else that people need to be aware of that just because they're at home, they're actually possibly less safe than they are under the old perimeter that they would have found themselves in, in the more conventional infrastructure. If they struggle to access data and systems, then they might attempt to use risky workarounds parts where sharing file sharing. All these things, increase the vulnerability to phishing and malware attacks.

You know, people say, oh, don't worry. I've got the password for those, for those files, I'll just email it to you, et cetera. So all these things are sometimes some way harder to manage when it's remote.

Then when, for example, these things might happen in a more controlled environment so that some of the things that have happened in this sudden shift to remote working, and then there was absolutely no doubt as this slide shows that the number of incidents has risen substantially in, in the period that we've been talking about. The FBI there said that the complaints about cyber attacks has gone up to as many as 4,000 a day. That's incredible 400% increase from what they saw pre coronavirus.

And if you think that we were already, we're living in a world where cyber attacks are very, very common, the fact that they've reached increased 400% shows that there is a lot of criminals out there that are doing pretty well out of this pandemic.

So two-thirds of Interpol members, sorry, two thirds of Interpol members from Europe said that they saw an increase in the number of malicious domains using the words COVID or Corona, hoping to attract people, seeking information on the, on the virus to insecure domains, where they might download stuff, or the might pose a man in the middle attack or a web attack. And in India, cyber techs saw an amazing 86%, just in four weeks between March and April this year, which was when the coronavirus really started to impact across the world.

So you can see at the bottom there there's 22% increase in number of vulnerabilities, 40% increase in internet services being consumed over enterprise connected device. So what were we talking about? And a huge 63% increase in references to video applications like zoom on the online black market.

Going back to that figure in a minute though, 40%, that's the increase in internet services that people are consuming from hub or from another remote area, which shows you how much we've switched from stuff being accessed in the work in the old office to the remote position and 41% of cyber sec PR professionals, sorry, only 41%. Sorry. You could put it that way. 59% don't believe that the best practices all being used to secure a remote.

And that's probably a pretty good estimation, I would say, oh, of the real figure, because as it's no one's fault, no one's believing the it security departments or the, the other leaders in industry, because it's all been suddenly thrust upon us, but it does mean that this is what's happened in, in the area of cyber crime. And some of these figures, as you can see, are, are a few months old.

And the, the likelihood is that this is probably increased in recent months. And finally, you can just see all the on the right there that the fishing is by far the most common form of cyber threat related to COVID. And just to really reiterate this, that, and the dark side of this is that the, these criminals are not just attacking remote workers in, in a normal way that they might, they've also taken advantage of our medical services across the world, being under huge stress, trying to deal with the impact of the pandemic. And they've deliberately targeted health institutions.

You can see there was 136 vulnerabilities per day targeting the healthcare sector. They've been posing pretending to be help desks and asking workers for secure security credentials and a hospital in Europe was even hit with a cyber attack that forced it to suspend its operations, which just shows you that criminals have a zero moral compass. And we shouldn't in any way, expect them to somehow ease up on attacks. And we shouldn't expect them to somehow be nice in that they won't attack institutions, which they feel more vulnerable because of the work they're doing.

So that affects the health sector, but it also affects the supply chain to the health sector, so that we've seen the problems that we've had across the world with providing PPE equipment and other essentials. And so the message here is that be very, very aware of what's happening and how criminals might target your into industry, fill their own ends. So just quickly some pointers really, I'm not gonna go all the way this, but I'll let you sort of digest it, but we really need to, you know, think a lot more about cybersecurity and the age of remote.

And that means that there are certain areas that perhaps organizations haven't really addressed to date. And if they have, then perhaps they need to re visit them. They need to do a risk assessment of how their operations are now as opposed to six to eight months ago. And how all this remote working is impacting on the business itself. They may be thinking about multifactor authentication. We all know that multifactor authentication is a lot more secure than a single factor endpoint protection.

I know that we'll be talking a lot more about this in a few minutes, but you may not even have any endpoint protection, or you may not know what you, what kind of employee protection use, how effective it is. Don't forget too, that there are security tools built into a lot of off the shelf stuff that we're now using such as Facebook and zoom and other video conferencing tools, which a lot of people don't switch on because they don't know that there, but even those tools themselves can add a layer of protection.

There's better than nothing until patch management is something that all security professionals are well aware of. But are you, for example, relying on automated patching and do you know what the state of patching is across everything, including of course your endpoints security training, not always something that is necessarily a priority in some cases, but keeping people aware of security and their responsibilities is undoubtedly a good thing, but it's not as good as the technology solutions being put in place as well. And finally, data protection, you've got to protect the crown jewels.

As we always say, you got to know what data you have and where it is who's accessing it, who has perhaps privilege access to it and so on. And do people really need access to it remotely. All these things are just some of the things that you should be thinking about in this new age that we're living in. So finally, some six basic rules for better cybersecurity. And this really applies to users.

If one message that you can say to them is if something looks strange or has never happened before, if something looks too good to be true, then it probably is so encourage people to think twice before clicking on links, et cetera, are the security settings settings on. Like I've just said a lot of off the shelf tools in windows and sharing applications have tools which can easily be set. They can be set remotely as well, and they can be fixed so that your users are protected.

Do you know people, if you get an email from someone you never heard of before invest, do you treat that with suspicion as well, pins and passwords? Well, passwords are passwords. We all know that they have their limitations, but things like two factor multifactor authentication are much better. So start thinking about how you authenticate people when they're working remotely, don't click on back links. I've said that already, and don't do anything that you wouldn't do in your private life on your own systems.

Actually, that, that kind of advice is almost back to front because some people do stuff on private systems that they wouldn't do on something that they believe is being done on an office system. So the, the advice area is basically just use, treat everything with extreme caution and just use good, common sense when it comes to working remotely. And at this point I'd like to hand over now to Anna, who is the chief mentor with Alcon.

Hello, Anna. Thank you.

So hello, and thank you everybody for joining us today and thank you for all, for setting the context. Right. And I did like a couple of notes that you mentioned during the presentation, especially on the fact that OnPrem mice now have to be remote or it's kind of become a must and data protection. I think all that we try to do on the petty fairy is no longer important. I think it's important literally in terms of what you're protecting when you're protecting and how you're protecting and data becomes the core center of protection and security is always on.

So I think with these words, I will try and see if I could articulate the new normal that we are expecting, especially how those tools and technologies would help us to overcome some of these challenges so quickly. I think COVID-19 has been of course, a crisis for the mankind, but it's also kind of evolving into a port, should be for looking at business processes.

So in a way different way, literally we worked from home loan from home on, from home and access has become literally literally we're chill so much so that the airline companies are literally closed, but tombs and all of these VCs of tools have become hyper valued today. And that's an interesting way to look at it and an interesting way that we see that the future of it evolve. Let me now talk to you about access. We are all looking at remote access, remote workforces.

So what was happening during the pandemic, every company, and, and believe me right from Japan, the us people would have invested millions and millions of billions of dollars into making sure that the employees are all laptops or neighbor or remote devices enabled most of our laptops today, as you see them are loaded with VPNs or our clients, or several agents are on them to either protect us or make sure that we are accessing the right set of data access licenses.

Lot of times than the organizations that have bought are kind of limited because of the budgets and so on and so forth, which also creates another set of challenges. We do complain about slow axes, which leads to bad user experience because we would have probably not timed it, right. Or we would have probably not got the, the specs, right? In terms of, you know, what kind of hardware do you require?

So if you look at organizations today, it ops are more or less struggling with granting the right taxes to the right set of people, which means many, a times security is actually diluted because access is important business, as you go is important. And this becomes even more challenging when you have large data access becomes really challenged to transfer your files. And Paul mentioned about file sharing and collaboration. It all gets into a challenge mode and the last one being very, very important, but it's just in time request.

Now earlier when you had teams and somebody would request you for a specific access, you didn't have support teams. You didn't have internal portals to help people to get the right diagnosis. If you would have invested in maybe a ticketing tools or ion solutions, you could still manage to do it, but today suddenly your, your workforce is sitting outside. They want to request something which is only temporary, or you may want to just give it to them.

So even, even before the pandemic, I think we did have challenges. For example, getting an ID created, especially if you look at infrastructure in your data centers, you would need to log the call.

Say, for example, you wanted to create a identity on our database. You would need to call the call on maybe a service now or ticketing tool. It will go to several rounds in a workflow. Users would debate whether you need that kind of access on what tables and what you need to do. Admin would log on that after, and then actually manually create to on the system and then give you an appropriate role. But when the user finally logs on, he would realize that he's not able to find a quality because he does not have an access on the table.

So this is just a small example, but we still had these challenges even before the pandemic led to we work today. Like Paul mentioned, it's the on-premise solutions are literally forced to be remote. So we work in per mice with maybe SFPs or Actos of the world or your legacy applications. You still may have data centers, which are improvised data center. And I'm sure all of us would have done some investment or the other in the cloud, looking at acquiring assets in the cloud as we speak. So literally today, if I were to ask this question again, B2B work, we actually all across.

We are all, all, all the way in promisee and some pieces in the cloud. And it's a mix of the match that you have today. If you see the slide, what's the conventional method of access or creating a layer of security around each of these access points. So unfortunately, conventionally, you would still look at them in silos. So if you look at applications, you would have some kind of security and access control built into a, with some MFA or maybe active dietary authentication.

And if you have your devices, your networking devices, or operating systems or databases, you would again have some kind of controls, which could be similar. But most of the time they end up being different because different technologies work best for different technologies. And you would have again, put them in a silo. And if you're also happened to have an eye breach data center, maybe access to apps and the cloud or infrastructure, you would, again, struggle to have the right MFA, the right cloud SSO, and then you would want to do a cloud DLP and so and so forth.

So I think today, if you look at the world in terms of how security is configured, you typically end up having some times more security solutions than business solutions that you would have if you're security paranoid. And if you're not, then of course you have various doors, which got you to be open both for improvise and in the cloud. So if you were to, in hindsight, look at the security that you have today. There are two basic elements that everybody tends to focus on.

One is the identity and other is the device, and you still want to manage the identities and the devices and end up managing them separately for improvise and in cloud systems, if you are an organization which has evolved, and you've been invested in maybe an IAM solution or a privileged access management solution conventionally, again, you'll end up investing in a solution, which is again, all over the place, especially if you have assets which are across in promisees or across the cloud infrastructure. So, and that typically leads, leads to an experience not being good.

So if you look at any business model today, people look at the outcome, which is so important and experiences become expediential access. I would say it's become, so I don't think it's important. I think it's become a necessity in today's world. So typically when a business user logs on to a VPL, whether his client is looking, sometimes a VPN is slow. It's really literally frustrating and thousands and thousands of man hours. And Mandy is a lost and leaves to channel frustration in terms of Hey, kind of basic technology goal, right?

So that literally sometimes is the level of access of security that he has. And because most of us are security, paranoid of cyber attackers of course have a field day. So what we tend to do is we tend to create as many authentication layers as we would like to create. And that's what CSOs would of course wanted because they want it to be secure. And unfortunately, the more authentication layers that you create, it's, it's, it's proved to various studies that the modal authentication layers that to, to create the highest user access problem.

And you need a large team behind to ensure that everything is running smoothly. And this also most of the time creates a challenge in terms of expedience.

I would typically call this as high friction and low security high friction, because it's not good in terms of an experience and low security, because when something is frustrating and something is not good, you tend to load your card because of course, business literally comes first and security is something which comes later most of the time, if you were to read a recent article by jacksy, and I would that site G and I would definitely recommend you to read this one. It's a very interesting article says goodbye, VPNs.

And I have added that, you know, you may even say goodbye to because sometimes the VPNs and the VDI is a while they add a little security, which we, which we think that they do also create another layer of administration, a nightmare for us in terms of managing the VPNs and the controls and the access controls within them. And the VDI is create another layer of access control in terms of what device you're accessing.

Who's given to whom and which again, machine is connected to which applications internally, and you still have a nightmare in keeping your firewall rules appropriately set up. So while you've created a layer, you've landed up creating while you created a layer of security, you've landed up creating another nightmare, especially for security professionals or for VIP infrastructure team. So what do we, what do we really make of that? I think we are in a new normal, and this word has been of course repeated several times during the last five or six months.

But the way that I understand this is our user could be anyone. It could be an employee, it could be a third party user. It could be a customer. It could be just about a bot of which wants to connect. It could be a machine ID which wants to connect. So a user is just about anyone. Our device today has to be just about any device. It could be a mobile device, it could be a laptop, or it could be an iPad. It could be just about anything anywhere. And it could be you and a handheld smaller device, especially for an OT or an IOT device or so, and support and access.

Interestingly is anywhere any time, which means today, you literally want to access the lowest possible application within your data center. So if you're working in a bank, the core banking solution was never in the past available to you remotely at the max, it was available to your branches where your employees could log on and then talk about the balances. But the core banking application today, I think is available in terms of access to remote users, third party.

And interestingly, because of the API is now the, these applications are accessible on a transaction basis, even to FinTech organizations and the FinTech organizations then create an access land for you, which is typically a mobile app, or are any of these applications hosted on your laptops or iPads and so on and so forth. So I think anyone, any device access anywhere anytime is literally become a new normal, especially under the new circumstances. So if this was the new normal, what would one really need to do?

One would really need to innovate and come out with a secure work Alexis layer, which takes away the pain of VPNs, which takes away the pain of , which helps you to make sure that you are continuously assessed. And which helps you to make sure that your access is granted is seamless without taking too much time on the flight.

And so, and support, that would be an ideal solution to ensure that your experiences good and security is on. And that's why I said, when Paul said that security is all, literally now means that security works in the background, but in the foreground, you are as efficient and you are as experiential as possible. And if I were to just take a cue from OTT platforms like the Netflix's of the world and streaming platforms, they really offer you a very low friction axes.

And these are device agnostic, identities agnostic, you access it from anywhere, any device, they actually start where they left off and they make sure that the security is in and they ask, keep asking you all the right set of questions at the right time. And, and, and the response and the ability to ingest your response is also very, very simple. You just click a yes on a nose and you are in the platform and able to have a good experience around it.

So I'm saying literally the way that I see it is a nice access platform with your applications, loaded something like a OTT platform that streams to you, whether the applications are in the cloud or whether the applications are in the data center, or they could be anywhere with a third part equals to infrastructure or so. And so, but when it comes to you, it literally comes to you in an aggregated fashion that you are able to play it off. I think at argon B the CS, we believe that this is the way that to be able to look at it in future.

And the only way to solve this problem is to try and create a nice secured watch Alexis live. We've literally worked on this for the last one and half years, and we have put together pieces of the whole access platform, including the intuitive access and in a manner which will become experiential for users on one side. And that would help you to have a absolutely fantastic security on the other side, which is embedded. And it does not create a friction.

And, and, and what does this word access? What does this watch relaxes? Let you control it should let you control you and identities. No doubt about it. It should let you control your privilege identities because identities change color. Why you may be a novel identity for accessing one application. You could be a privileged identity accessing another set of applications or devices. So literally a single identity could change colors.

And you could be a machine identity, for example, because you're a bot and you want the bot to do automated stuff for you, and which happens to work on your machine, or which happens to work in the data center. It could be anywhere. So literally identities could change color, but your platform should be able to recognize it, color, react to it and help you to access what you really need to access and gone are the days that people want to type in and key in the passwords, they are white from a cybersecurity perspective, they are the least protected.

And, and typically the approach should be to have a password list approach. And so the solution that we kind of, you know, construct and offer are, is literally passwordless, which has an inbuilt zero trust and continuous assessment, which was in the background. And you could use any of the methodologies or facial recognition or biometrics or OTPs, and this is our mobile soft token or heartbroken, and you could choose it on the fly or when you're accessing it from where you're accessing it. So depending on where you are, you could choose the right medium to do what you want to do.

And especially when you ingest then coming to the platform, access should be preferred to be just in time, which means you need to have a very seamless workflow on the mobile phones for you to be able to access at any point in time, any device or application. And so it's support. So how would we like it to work literally in cloud without having to be in cloud and change, usually experience assuming that security is a cable, I call this low friction high security.

And if I were to just summarize this identities in boards that, you know, we bring on the platform, or we provide as an amazing value added solution is you could have a normal user. Third-part your privilege. You could have multiple interfaces. I spoke to you, but in the built-in SSO component in time component built on top of a zero trust model, which means that it's a continuous risk assessment, which happens behind. And this is built on top of a word Alexis platform, which means it's a streaming platform, which helps you to steam your applications or devices or whatever.

And these could be business applications or end points, or it could be data center resources, and then they can integrate in with our centralized board to help you to ensure that your credentials are also rotated. And you have a strong identity and secrets go with this program. I don't at the center. I think it offers an amazing way to ensure that identity governance and credential governance is taken care of with lot of expediential exits.

Finally, to talk about the second layer, which is the endpoints. If you look at the conventional way that we have been working with the end points is that we normally harden the device. We control the admin IDs on the device control and have none of endpoint protection. And then on the second leg, we try and control the installation of the applications on the top layer. If you see, we have what the indications like, that's an MFS, but a very important element of all of this is this becomes, or unfortunately has become very device centric.

So literally any control that you're trying to port is literally become a very, very device centric. And it has very limited user context to all of this.

And, and if you're asking us to protect this, it's like in the sea, you're looking at to protect maybe your data or your device. So this makes it very, very difficult. How is this likely to change because of the more taxes or people working from home? I think the second layer, which is very, very important, and this layer is the user and the data context layer, which is likely to be the future of protecting on the endpoints in the future. It should be, do what you want to do. Security is always on.

We would understand it, profile it, break your data, elements into pieces and marry it with something that you want to access and not want to access should access and should not access. Maybe the times that are allowed to access are not allowed to access, but that has all to be related to the context and the data that you're accessing. So literally the other way to handle this is to have a nice user behavior analytics solution, which encompasses all of this, especially when you're doing on the remote.

And it acts as a third layer of defense for you and helps you to have ease of operations that support it, not only secures the endpoint with a single agent, but it helps you to do a lot of things around the data which becomes, or which is likely to become very, very important with an authentication layer, which does maybe a facial recognition on an ongoing basis and so on and so forth. So this can be integrated to your SIM tools, or it can be integrated with your system of solutions.

And that would probably help you to be on top of the league in terms of taking the first route forward on contextual data protection, especially on the end point. So literally the way that we see it is that we don't see identities at all because the colors change and we don't see devices at all, because again, the colors change. What we literally see is data. And we literally see is who's accessing the data. It could be machine identities or human identities or prototype identity sense, so and so forth.

So I think, I think just to wrap this up, I think it's time for us to reimagine the way that we look at our entire access platforms and reimagine the way that we look at protecting data and devices, especially on your end point. So this is what I wanted to kind of, you know, put on the table tarp processes, and that's where our con the risk solution does is control solutions, companies investing very, very heavily in, and we have some very interesting solutions around this areas, which will help you to, to, to streamline and create a nice expedience around it.

So, so this is what I had. Paul, thank you so much, like to hand this back to you for questions. Thank you so much. I know as I already enjoyed that, and I think I will look up the article you mentioned there, the VPNs are dead long live. I think it was identity access proxies sounds like a something worth looking into, but that was on medium.com. That's right. Absolutely. Yeah. So I think it's a very good read and I strongly believe that that's the only way for it to go in the future because you cannot have too many layers of boxes sitting and stuff like that.

It would eventually become streaming most of the time. And these proxies should be the next generation ones of it should be able to maybe then handle even the accesses of controls. And I'm not sure Paul, if you've looked at it, but you know, one such application streaming layer is what we have in awaited. And that really helps you to make it very, very seamless for people.

Yeah, no, I think it's, it's definitely the less, less we have. I, I really agree with your, your, with your vision.

We, we have some questions and I believe that Alcon does have a SAS offering, which you didn't mention, but it might be worth just talking about that because SAS, in this new era, certain organizations will be looking for a SAS offering. So they, they want the security, but they don't want to host the security as it were. So can you tell us a little bit about that?

Yeah, I think a very interesting question. And, you know, fundamentally there are three business models evolving in the world. One is the outcome-based model, which means you not all want to buy a car which looks good or runs faster. You want to buy a car which engages with you, right? So it's literally the outcome, which is very important.

Similarly, if you look at education today, the outcome is important in terms of, you know, intuitive education. The second model Paul, which is evolving is around hyper-personalization, which means you, every business model wants to hyper-personalized it. And the third model is access versus ownership, and that's where SAS products and cloud systems come into play. That means people got waxes. They no longer want the challenge of implementation ownership running it. And so and so forth. So earlier we caught that for especially vaults and privileged access management solutions.

This would be a tough call because people don't want their passwords to go out of their promisers and stay solely in the cloud. But I think as I see this evolving in the future, I think the cloud frameworks and the cloud balls, and what you do in the cloud is sometimes far more protected because you're able to focus and put all your energies on trying to make sure that your walls are, are hyper protected with the best possible technology. So I think the SAS platform that we have built up is a very interesting one.

It offers you the ease of getting started with better security around the world. And the, and, and, and the good part is because we are still in the journey of, in premise and in cloud data centers and assets being everywhere. This SAS platform is able to handle hybrid data center or hybrid resources or application. So it's able to work with a single platform, it's able to take care of what you need. So I think we offered a very interesting privileged access management solution as a, as a SAS platform. And it seamless.

So multilingual it's just on the fly and offers almost all the features that one would like to have, especially when we would have seen in the interim, my solution apart. Great.

And I, people can find more about that on your website. I'm sure.

I, I mentioned in my presentation about security awareness and education, and I, I'm not a disbeliever in that it has its place, but I think technology is really the answer. And if we can automate things as much as possible, so that, like you say, it's friction-free security. So how do you see technologies like occupational intelligence and machine learning, helping to improve cyber security, not just in remote access, but perhaps in other areas?

Yeah, I think that's, it's really good. Like a lot of valuable. And let me just take a very small example of all of this.

When I, when he said that you want to be on a virtual access platform and you want to request for access as maybe just in time, because you want to ensure that security is built into it, but wouldn't it be frustrating if I keep asking for the resource, whether it's a business application or a server, and maybe say at 10 o'clock every day, because I need to do something just for an hour and because of security, somebody doesn't want to give it to me in terms of a permanent access, which means a either I put in a request on multiple requests, which is approved sometimes that is also not a good thing to do.

So a very, very small use case for an artificial intelligence working is that it learns what I really do on a daily basis. And one learns. It can probably the next time just pick up and say, Hey, you know what? Anil has always been accessing this mushy net, the Nepal, and always been working for one hour. So why would I want him to keep asking for it? It goes into a automatic route because the artificial intelligence system understands it pretty well.

But if I'm locking onto that device, maybe half an hour late, then the artificial intelligence system understands the fact that, Hey, you know, in 30 is not your time. You might want to go to a small round of authentication to say that you are who you are. So I think from this use case to maybe I'll 50 Farfetch extended ones, in terms of facial recognition, continuous assessment poll, I think artificial intelligence and machine learning will help us to create more and more should I say, efficient lists, a high security products.

So, and I think that should be part of the new norm. Yeah, absolutely agree with you. One thing also, we didn't really talk about, but that, of course it's become much more a part of the way we're working now, and that is social media and it's, I'm not unknown for social media to be used as a basis for attacks, but it's also used sometimes a social media account can be hijacked by people that shouldn't use it to help. How can we protect corporate social media?

Oh, So I, I think, I think this is really, yeah, this is really coming up, but every client that we work with, so in pro my solution, of course, as a social media module to it, which ensures that you're able to access your source of media with warranting, your Facebooks and LinkedIns and Twitters, don't really provide you with API APIs. So unfortunately you can't really rotate it automatically, but I think we've integrated it with the RPA platform. So your social media accounts are also as protected and vaulted when you want to access them.

And most of the clients that we worked with have either outsourced it to some marketing agencies and literally have zero control on any of the accounts that they have internally or externally. So the SAS platform that I was talking to you has a social media module, which means that your marketing agency can come and register themselves and your companies can have the social media accounts up and running. And then you kind of, you know, and show that you have a seamless access to your accounts at the same time in the background, your credentials are altered.

And if you want, you could actually do in session monitoring and murdering, and maybe a live streaming to other platforms so that somebody can actually keep doing what you're doing at what point in time and so and so forth. And I think this becomes a very, very important use case because I'm sure all of us have seen the Twitter hat, which is an inside, outside job. And that really brings in a large impact item for any organization and able maybe, maybe a personal user.

So yeah, I think that's a very important area to look at it. Yeah. Okay. We're coming. Sorry. We're nearly out of time, but maybe you could give us a checklist for securing remote access. What would be your sort of number one?

Sorry, not number one, but your top five, perhaps tips for securing remote access. So I vote the, the, the first thing that I would look at this authentication because the platform needs to be authenticated in a manner which is highly secure. So the first thing that I would look at is does one have the ability to do a passwordless authentication and the authentication engine should have choices of multiple MFA's, which these I could choose what I want at what point in time, because sometimes the one way to do an access on NFV does not help you once you do the authentication.

The second thing that I would expect is of any seamless platform in terms of making sure that my apps and my resources are available to me from any devices or any location with the nice geotag security built in behind. That's. The second thing that I would look at, I'm a great fan of making it expediential. So which means you should have minimum screens, and I believe you to click and get into these apps.

So anybody security and the third thing that I would really want to ensure is the ability of managing the entire governance framework of who wants what, when that should be very, very strong, because most of the time, since I have a consulting background, most of the time the cracks come in, not because you don't have a good product, have a good security, but the crack comes into a process. So the third thing that I would look at is in terms of having and making sure that the entire governance piece of giving somebody, what he wants is absolutely in place.

The fourth that I would look at is a very, very strong board because anything and everything that you do, including the five share, we literally share files all across and credentials all across. So it should have an embedded vault to be able to help you to make sure that all of your fives are getting secured.

Your, your transactions online are encrypted and also your passwords or biometrics or multiple MFA's get the Waltrip where you will. And these are high velocity evolves because if you're working with automation and all, then you were required to have this. And the last piece is that, do you have a good visualization around and our data analytics platform to ensure that you are able to drill down who, when, what, how, and you're able to quickly visualize what somebody is doing.

And I mean, these are the five things that I would personally look at to ensure that I have a, I have a good system in place to make sure that I protect the organization and make the users happy. Thank you so much. I'll earn some excellent tips there. We are coming to the end now.

So it just leaves me to thank you once again for your contribution this afternoon, or this evening to where you are certainly enjoyed it, myself, some good stuff for, for me to look up after the webinar also to thank you for your time listening today, if any of your colleagues want to listen to it and weren't able to join us live. Then as I said, this will be downloaded to our website KuppingerCole dot com, where there'll be able to see it. And also the slides will be available for download. But for now that it does bring us to the end of today's webinar. Thank you once again for joining us.

And I hope to join you again on a future webinar. So goodbye, and thank you again, Anna. Thank you, Paul. Thank you. And thank you for the wonderful work that you're doing in the research. Thank you so much. Thank you.