Network security, data availability, and protection become a crucial priority for organisations for truly seamless business continuity among Indian firms.

Business continuity during the COVID-19 lockdown is a big challenge. Firms are not just at risk of losing web connectivity and outages, but data security vulnerabilities and cybersecurity attacks from malicious attackers. 

With the lockdown extended around the world, employees continue to work remotely on their private networks, which is undoubtedly a threat to most companies. This may be challenging for organisations with increasing cyber threats. As per a study by PwC, the number of cyberattacks on Indian companies has doubled in the past few days, as cybercriminals use the disruption brought about by the COVID-19 outbreak to infiltrate corporate networks and steal data. 

Here, network security, data availability, and protection become a crucial priority for organisations for truly seamless business continuity. Additionally, remote working has resulted in bandwidth issues as the requirement has skyrocketed within a span of the last few weeks. Effective traffic management is also a key priority for organisations during this time.

It is, therefore, critical for businesses to look at the various means by which they can address the complex security challenges, with the escalating threats prevailing due to remote working during COVID-19 outbreak.

Remote working practices are in full swing, especially in these challenging times. Organisations are taking the best precautionary steps to support and protect employees during this global pandemic. Here, active traffic management is critical for an organisation’s application services to meet the new levels of demand and handle peak loads in traffic during COVID-19. 

Companies can look for backup solutions to make sure they do not lose data assets critical for the continuity of operations. For this, organisations can leverage cloud data management to counter the COVID-19 disruption, data availability, and protection across any cloud, network, or platform to ensure business continuity.

Data Backup Solutions

A backup solution can deliver cloud data management, which can be a real asset for organisations to manage and protect data across any application or cloud infrastructure, as employees work remotely, according to Sandeep Bhambure, India MD of Veeam Software.

There are many such backup tools for cloud, for example, Veeam, which offers a single platform that can help organisations modernise backup, accelerate hybrid-cloud, and secure data. 

“The main responsibility of businesses is to ensure that their company’s data is protected from any cyber threats and is available to employees for seamless business continuity. As data availability and protection across workloads and networks become a key priority for organisations, they are looking for a simple, flexible and reliable solutions during the current times of uncertainty,” told Bhambure to Analytics India Magazine. 

Traffic Management

Other experts and leaders in the security industry say that in order to respond to the cybersecurity complexities of remote working due to COVID-19, organisations must take a “trust nobody” approach to security. They must ensure that no user has access to data that they don’t depend on for their day-to-day functions. Organisations must also ensure visibility into all users, traffic, data, and workloads, and have uniform security policies applied across all locations to make sure no security loopholes exist. 

On ensuring network security and data traffic management at the time of COVID-19, we also talked with Sanjai Gangadharan, Regional Director, SAARC, A10 Networks. “Remote working is the need of the hour for organisations in India as social distancing amid lockdown becomes a priority in fighting the COVID-19 battle. Network protection from distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks is a key concern of remote working for organisations. 

Cybersecurity must be a top priority for organisations to address the key concerns. They must reassess their IT framework as employees remotely working may not have access to a robust cybersecurity solution to protect from the external threats,” Sanjai Gangadharan said.

Remote working has resulted in bandwidth issues as the requirement has skyrocketed within a span of the last few weeks. For businesses providing technology-based solutions, traffic management for their customers is a significant concern. An organisation’s application services must meet the new levels of demand and handle peak loads in traffic. 

“Traffic management is now needed to perform an expanding number of demanding tasks to ensure fast response across networks and scalable content availability with unrelenting application security. To combat the bandwidth issues, organisations must leverage the power of additional application delivery controllers to address the changes in website traffic,” added Gangadharan.

Further, according to Sanjai Gangadharan, embracing artificial intelligence, machine learning, and automation can help firms discover known and unknown attacks in real-time. Blending such advanced capabilities with actionable threat intelligence is particularly important with the ongoing shortage in security expertise.

The post How Can Indian Firms Maintain Network Security And Data Protection During Lockdown? appeared first on Analytics India Magazine.