Check Point Software Technologies’ recent survey – 2021 Remote and Hybrid Work Security Report – discloses how COVID-19 pandemic has affected organisations, especially when it comes to IT and security strategies.
Cyberattacks and threats have increased as hackers have taken advantage of the shift to remote and hybrid work, and this survey confirms that there is a growing shift towards cloud-based security and SASE solutions.
Rafi Kretchmer, VP of Product Marketing at Check Point Software, said, “The shift to remote and hybrid work is one of the most important changes to have taken place as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.”
He added that many organisations have had to compromise network performance and protection across their distributed environments because they use multiple different point products, which leads to management complexity and fragmented threat visibility.
He said, “Many organisations are feeling more at risk and there is a growing shift towards cloud-based security. The SASE framework consolidates cloud services to minimise attack surfaces and improve the user experience.”
Key findings from the survey of 450 global IT and security professionals include:Â
• Remote work brings increased risk: According to 45% of all respondents, organisations are at higher risk of cyberattacks as they shift to remote working. The industries that reported the highest level of cyberattacks were finance (54%), utilities (52%) and manufacturing (47%).
• Administration challenges: The top three issues IT and security professionals contend with are scaling performance (46%), addressing privacy and data sovereignty concerns (42%) and supporting remote access for employees’ unmanaged devices (40%).Â
• Strategies for scaling remote access: To meet the hike in demand for remote working, 69% of security professionals report they are adding on-prem capacity; 66% are moving to cloud-based security and surprisingly, 36% do both.
• Protecting remotely accessed apps: When enabling remote access to corporate apps, 70% consider the security of applications against cyberattacks and zero-day threats to be of high importance.
• Adopting SASE technology: 94% are familiar with the secure access service edge framework, but adoption is slow, with 9% having already implemented it and 21% planning to do so.
The survey also indicated the dual adoption of both cloud and on-prem security. For expediency, it may be easier to add capacity to current solutions, rather than rip out and replace them with completely new ones. Alternatively, this may reflect a phased approach to adopting cloud-based services or may be a result of data residency considerations.
Yet 66% are using cloud-based security services to scale up remote access and 61% of those respondents consider cloud-based security services to be critical to scaling remote access (including 83% of senior management).
