With the recent shift of working models, enterprises can expect an exponential increase in data exfiltration attempts by threat actors. Surendra Singh, Senior Director and Country Manager, Forcepoint highlights the human-centric security solutions offered by the company that protect critical data while enabling productivity, collaboration and ensuring regulatory compliances
How do you assess the current scenario and the lessons learned? What’s your preparedness to handle such unprecedented situation?
Businesses all over the globe are scrambling to enable their employees work remotely in response to the current environment. For most of them, it is an unchartered business territory because their global workforce has to be shifted to a large-scale remote work model almost overnight. While business continuity plans are developed for external events beyond our control, they aren’t generally intended to cover an entire global workforce going remote within a matter of weeks.
It’s important that IT leaders rely on their organisation’s business continuity plans. Such situation can happen again. Many companies won’t have a complete business continuity plan in place or they may need to update the one they have. As this becomes the new way of working for the foreseeable future, this is a foundational aspect of keeping a business operational. Additionally, good business continuity plans can also help mitigate negative long-term impacts to business.
We have enacted our emergency preparedness plan and stands fully engaged to manage through the current threat.
How are you safeguarding your customers’ assets/premises to ensure the continuity of their business operations?
Our Business Continuity Plan (BCP) includes enabling complete remote virtual private network (VPN) capabilities for all critical roles. Forcepoint’s WFH capability allows employees to comprehensively duplicate office capabilities from any location in the world. This includes sales, professional services, technical support, core operations, and product engineering teams.
Additionally, through our 24×7 available and highly skilled technical and functional resources, customers can advance security posture, enhance network infrastructure, and embrace new solutions with confidence.
With the sudden rise in cyber threats and attacks during this period, how are you ensuring your customers’ data is safe and helping them mitigate risks?
Data is the lifeblood of any business, so are the employees. With the recent shift of working models, we can expect an exponential increase in data exfiltration attempts by threat actors. To stay relevant in the future filled with various cyber risks, we offer human-centric security solutions that protect critical data while enabling productivity, collaboration and ensuring regulatory compliances.
Employees are creating new routines as they work-from-home. By leveraging behavior-based security technology to identify baseline behavioral habits of employees, organisations can help secure both employees and critical business data that attackers are looking to exploit during these unprecedented times. By identifying anomalous behavior in real-time, organisations can stop breaches before they happen, while enabling productive WFH.
During this time of total lockdown, how are you ensuring 24×7 service and support to your customers?
Forcepoint has many products that have features allowing for frequent and relevant updates to be delivered to customers’ platform, ensuring an optimized security posture. Sometimes these features are referred to as ‘Phone Home’. In addition, we have several products delivered via our cloud operations platform.
We want to reassure customers of our robust BCP capabilities, comprehensive operations, and are committed to supporting them as trusted security partners during a crisis like the one we’re facing today.
Soon we will witness business models changing, wherein there will be far more remote workers in any organisation. In such scenario, what are the best cybersecurity practices that your customers should adopt?
Organisations need to have BCP in the first place to reshape and work during emergencies like these. Businesses should use this opportunity to validate and scale work from home assumptions. The most important is to ensure that VPN and broader security strategies are in place. This should cover the new hybrid IT infrastructure, as well as the tools and apps the workforce is currently using and plans to use in the future.
