In a world where natural and man-made disasters occur, Pulse Secure wants to help keep your business running effectively and securely so you can focus on what’s really important – keeping your employees, friends, and family safe. As the impact of the Coronavirus (COVID-19) intensifies, organisations must adjust for increased stay, connect and work from home mandates. Beyond impacting user productivity, this emergency workplace shift can stress IT infrastructure and operations.
Many circumstances and compliance obligations require organisations to activate or rapidly extend remote access capabilities as part of a business continuity strategy. With advanced planning, crises that require immediate, varied and increased remote access capacity should not increase threat exposure, cyberattack and data leakage risks.
Being prepared for unforeseen and prolonged disruptions, or even network downtime, requires pre-determined contingency notifications and processes, as well as solutions with enough coverage, flexibility and capacity in place to allow your mobile workforce to easily and securely collaborate and access the applications, resources and services needed to continue to do business no matter where they reside, in the network, data centre or cloud.
Here are important tips to ensure business resiliency, user productivity and secure access:
- Understand your remote access needs in terms of users, applications and resources in order to assess respective physical, virtual or user-based connection capacity and throughput.
- Identify key applications and resources, whether on-premises or cloud, that will require increased capacity and apply to an emergency capacity plan.
- Explore application and security tool license and capacity shifting options set in advance with your vendors to handle burst utilisation.
- Review and maintain an application, data and role mapping to ensure users only access the resources they need and have processes in place to quickly respond to user or role escalation and ad hoc privileged access and revocation.
- Consider virtual and cloud environment deployment and clientless mode to allow for more rapid on-demand deployment and scalability.
- Establish Disaster Recovery (DR) sites to provide secure access services in case of a primary site outage or failure and explore Secure Access solutions’ DR options for active/active or active/ passive modes.
- Build, publish and review emergency remote work guidelines, resources and communications.
- Activate advanced secure access usability features for streamlined access, such as: always-on, per application and simultaneous tunnelling, configuration lockdown, clientless operation and online portals.
- Ensure emergency means to simulate on-premise access, including Layer-3 access to a specific subnet, HTML5 access to local machines, or Virtual Desktop Infrastructure by privileged users and technicians.
- Enforce endpoint compliance policy and activate self-remediation capabilities to reduce phishing and ransomware threats introduced by increased remote users and potential vulnerable devices.
- Invoke mobile device security options, such as mobile VPN, device security, segregating corporate apps and information, and data encryption to allow for broader for corporate and personal device use.
- Utilise Adaptive Authentication and User Entity Behavior Analytics (UEBA) to better understand and react to new user/device usage, as well as unwanted and anomalous activity.
- Leverage usage analytics, bandwidth “throttling” and optimised gateway selection capabilities to better distribute workloads and to deliver “essential” applications to users without performance degradation.
Pulse Secure Access Solutions
Pulse Secure offers the industry’s most comprehensive and reliable secure access portfolio to protect connectivity from any user and device to applications, resources and services in the cloud and data centre. Our enterprise-class secure remote access solutions deliver ease of use, visibility and compliance with extensive deployment flexibility, interoperability and scale. Key features include:
- Secure and streamlined access to data centre and cloud – anywhere, anytime – from a device of choice
- Always-on, per-app and simultaneous tunnel capability securing access and user productivity
- Rapid deployment and flexible licensing; runs in physical, virtual and cloud environments
- Clientless access – access web applications and virtual desktops with nothing to install
- Group policy – integrated with directory services like Active Directory and LDAP
- Continuous strong authentication – support for MFA, SAML 2.0, PKI, IAM, and digital certificates
- Endpoint compliance – check remote devices for type, configuration and security compliance before making a connection
- Unified Client – native coverage across popular OS’s and devices for enhanced user experience and consistent policy enforcement
- Built-in policy templates covering guest management, app access and IoT device security
- Fortified BYOD – lightweight native MDM solution plus support for third-party Enterprise Mobile Management
- Single sign-on (SSO) – simplify access for expedited, authenticated application access
- Centralised management – our Pulse One manager enables centralised administration of policy, compliance, and authorisation across cloud and data center
- Optimised Gateway Selection feature and Application Delivery Controller solution to ensure user experience, application performance and protection, and business resiliency.
- Ecosystem Integration – works with popular infrastructure and security systems: NGFW, MFA, IDP, MDM and SIEMs.
If you would like to discuss how the Pulse Secure solution might fit within your organisation please reach out to your Account Manager, or contact [email protected].