There was a time when desktops used to sit nicely at the desk and so did work. Then the generation X workforce was hit with the first wave of mobile devices — Laptops — and things changed. For the first time, people felt the joy of stepping outside the cubicle and working on-the-go. And they loved it!
Since then, there has been no looking back. The second wave was that of the smartphones, followed by the tablets, and now the wearables. These devices are becoming more deeply ingrained in our day-to-day lives at home and at work. We are currently tipping 17 Billion connected devices worldwide and this number is expected to touch 34 Billion by 2025. While the proliferation of this increasingly connected world provides an opportunity to be more efficient in how we do things, it raises some strong security concerns for users that cannot be ignored.
Take a look around
An average person is expected to use around 6 network connected devices by 2020. Even the most technically challenged person use at least two — namely, laptop and cellphone. A major chunk of this number gets fueled by trends like bring your own device (BYOD) and work from home.
For most people, work starts at the office desk but ends at a coffee shop or the subway. Thanks to cloud computing, which gives you enough horsepower to carry your work around, irrespective of your location or device.
However, before expanding into this new digital frontier, there are certain things business leaders and decision makers should understand. Every new device being added to the network creates another potential loophole for cybercriminals to exploit. A recent study highlights the severity of these security threats as 42% of the respondents agreed to have experienced a breach, and 42% of those respondents had been breached on employees’ personal laptops.
The risk involved
Remember, your general security is only as strong as your weakest link. In this case, it’s endpoints. Your phones, laptops, wearables, smart homes and IoT devices are all connected to the same network. If someone is savvy enough to get access to your network — what are the odds that they will not be able to get access to your devices?
Your laptop might have the best security features, but what about that smart system in your home? Is it equally tough to break into? The moment a hacker gets access to one of these devices on the network, it opens the floodgates of attacks on every other device accessing that network. Also, as data is being extracted from small devices to large projects — threat comes not only from individual attackers but also from larger companies trying to get access to the data generated by your IoT devices for commercial gain.
Your employees are just trying to do their jobs with the best intentions, sometimes working on the go and sometimes working after-hours. But in the process of doing so, they are sharing highly sensitive information over non-secure devices and applications. The threat of your personal and official data falling into the hands of a competitor are both frightening and real. The worst thing you can do is to deceive yourself into thinking that you are not vulnerable to such attacks.
Monitor Devices = More Monitoring
As people spread their work across these devices, they want round-the-clock access to applications and services. And to provide that, your network needs to be up and running 24/7 This is where network monitoring comes in.
Network monitoring is your first line of defense against any sort of abnormal behavior in your infrastructure. Your network monitoring tool correlates data from different parts of the IT infrastructure, drilling-down to identify the underlying technical components, determining the sources of performance degradation, and then where applicable, rapidly making the configuration changes to remediate the problem.
Traditional network management solutions are bogged down by disparate monitoring and configuration tracking capabilities with no correlation between them. Unexpected configuration changes can result in major network outages, which can then take an extremely long time to track down. This drives up costs for the enterprise and affects overall business performance.
VSA’s advanced network monitoring addresses these challenges by providing business service monitoring, IT performance management, and flexible configuration management in one unified integrated system, right within VSA. The innovative service container technology enables IT personnel and management to create unique virtual views of discrete IT services, making the alignment of infrastructure technology with business performance a reality. To know more or book a free demo.
