Take a quick look around your office. Isn’t it great to see your team hard at work on their computers? Yet if we take a closer look, here’s what might be really happening…
- Joe, your new sales rep, is poring over last weekend’s game stats…
- Amy in marketing is looking for a new job, surfing your competitors’ websites, chatting with their HR people…
- Wes, over in customer support, just bogged down your entire network by downloading a video file of Metallica in concert…
- Guy, your new hire in shipping, is on hotdate.com, viewing questionable photos…
- Bob in accounting is browsing stock-investing sites, in search of a hot tip…
Okay, so maybe it’s not that bad at your company. (We hope not!) But this type of behavior will happen to some degree if you don’t proactively restrict it. The problem isn’t just that staff aren’t focused on productive work. The real issue is that unfiltered content can easily link to malware and other threats. Ignore it and you risk IT downtime, legal liabilities, fraud and ransomware. In whatever form it takes, the resulting data loss and corruption can cost your company, big time. You can’t count on your four-leaf clover or other lucky charm to protect you from cyberthreats stemming from unfiltered content.
Mobile devices make content filtering a greater challenge than ever before. Your company may already be doing some filtering at the network level. However, when was the last time you checked the number of mobile devices linked to your network? As your workforce goes mobile, your network’s “attack surface” rapidly expands. With BYOD (bring your own device) now the norm, the old rules of content filtering just don’t cut it anymore.
Are You Making Any of These Mistakes?
Old content-filtering models presume your network has a safe “firewall.” But now, with BYOD, you need a different way to protect your data. And that’s where endpoint security comes into play. Endpoint filtering keeps devices on your network safe from infection, no matter where they hook into the Internet.
But endpoint security is not bullet proof. Make any of the following oversights and your network could be a sitting duck:
- Miss even one endpoint. This applies to tablets and smartphones as well as home-based machines that VPN into your network.
- Skimp on security policies, protocols and training. Believing that tech tools alone will keep your network secure is a recipe for breaches. In fact, no technology can keep a network safe if users cut corners.
- Leaving endpoint filtering out of your overall security plan. Ad-hoc security invites disaster.
An improperly designed system exposes holes that cybercriminals exploit.
What Should You Filter?
Companies whose users access the cloud should deploy content filtering that does the following:
- Detect and intercept unusual or fraudulent activities related to data in the cloud
- Detect, neutralize and eliminate malware in cloud platforms
- Detect and monitor unsanctioned cloud applications and platforms usage
- Protect against leaks of confidential information
- Encrypt structured and unstructured data in cloud platforms
- Investigate suspicious users and incidents
Between BYOD and ever more complex cyberthreats, you simply can’t afford to run around putting out fires. In-depth endpoint content filtering will go a long way to proactively defending your network.