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When the pandemic hit, organizations were hit with an overnight shift to distributed workforce. This blog explores data points, perspectives and plans for the new normal.
The early days of the pandemic are over. The security decisions you made then may no longer serve you. It’s time to establish sustainable visibility and control over your new environment.
Tanium
“Initially, it was a band-aid over a bullet hole.”
Stephanie Aceves is a Director of Technical Account Management at Tanium, a provider of unified endpoint management and security solutions.
Aceves works directly with Tanium’s customers to drive successful deployments. She brings two unique perspectives to the table—a ground-level understanding of what her customers went through in their transition to WFH, and a picture of how their priorities have changed in the last six months.
Here’s what Aceves learned.
Mindset Shift: Moving From Temporary Fixes to Long-Term SolutionsAceves watched her customers take their long-term digital transformation strategies, and rush to implement them ASAP.
“You have a lot of people talking about migrating to the cloud. But you see they have two-, four-, six-year plans to get there,” explained Aceves. “COVID-19 told them—very quickly—that is not viable. If you want to keep up, you’re going to need to make these changes almost in an overnight fashion.”
Aceves’s customers were terrified about many aspects of this transformation.
Most of all, they were afraid of the security ramifications of moving their employees out of the hardened HQ, and into a fully distributed operational environment—especially when they had spent the last 5-10 years constructing security around their network perimeter.
And overnight that perimeter disappeared, along with its security controls.
“You look at this distributed workforce, and where’s the perimeter?” asked Aceves. “Do you put a perimeter around every single employee’s house? How do you properly secure these devices so they are able to connect to your company’s resources in a way that’s not obstructive to your employees, while addressing any risk you have with a workforce that’s completely remote?”
Aceves worked tirelessly with her clients to help them answer these questions, and maintain visibility and control over their environments, even as those environments rapidly transformed.
“I worked incredibly long hours,” said Aceves. “We went from providing almost emotional support to our customers, to telling them, ‘We are here to make changes to your business that are critical right now, because there is significant risk that is posed to your organization, and we have a way to get that figured out.’”
As a whole, Aceves and her customers were successful. They transitioned to a primarily distributed endpoint environment. They maintained business continuity. And they kept their people up and running.
But in order to do so, they had to make some hard decisions that served the unique needs of the moment, but may not serve the ongoing realities of the new normal.
How to Make Mass WFH Environments SustainableIn the early days of the pan
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