Secure Remote Access For Distributed Workforces

70% of organizations allow employees to access IT infrastructure and other corporate assets from personal devices. Find out why organizations need secure remote access.*

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What Is Secure Remote Access?

Secure remote access refers to solutions that enable organizations and their employees to safely access applications, networks, data centers and cloud resources remotely. With secure remote access, employees can establish remote connections from anywhere, minimizing the risk of unauthorized access to sensitive assets.

The Challenges of Remote Access

Modern distributed work models present new security challenges, as employees now access corporate resources from a multitude of locations on a variety of devices. Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) policies present security risks that can lead to data breaches, ransomware and other cyber attacks.

This is especially critical for distributed IT and DevOps teams, who are using privileged accounts to remotely perform infrastructure monitoring and management. IT and DevOps personnel need a secure, reliable, and scalable way to remotely connect to their machines using RDP, SSH, VNC, MySQL and other common protocols.

How to Enhance Remote Access Security

Assume Zero Trust

Zero trust is a modern security framework based on three core principles: assume breach, verify explicitly and ensure least privilege.

Assume breach: This principle requires organizations to assume any user on the network (human or device) could be compromised right now. Security measures should be in place to minimize the impact of a breach such as end-to-end encryption and network segmentation.
Verify explicitly: Every human and device should prove who they are before they’re able to access an organization’s network, systems, applications and data.
Ensure least privilege: When logged in to an organization’s network, users should only be given access to the systems, accounts and data they need to do their jobs and no more.

Implement the Principle of Least Privilege

The Principle of Least Privilege (PoLP) means restricting user and system accounts to the minimum level of access needed to perform a job. To implement PoLP, organizations need Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) which defines roles and allocates specific permission for each of those roles. RBAC simplifies access management and allows organizations to enforce least privilege.

Create Strict Remote Work Policies

Strict remote work policies are guidelines put in place by an organization to set rules and expectations for remote employees. Some examples of remote work policies include:

Whether or not employees can use personal devices
What software employees are allowed to download
How employees should report suspected cyber attacks

Invest in a Connection Management Solution

A connection management solution simplifies remote connections while hardening security. Instead of fumbling with a VPN, remote teams access internal resources simply by logging in through a web browser. Once they’re logged in, all work that remote users perform is executed behind the enterprise firewall, giving them the same protection from corporate security systems that they would have in a physical office environment.

How to Consolidate Remote Access With Keeper

Many organizations use separate tools to provide remote users with access to internal devices. While internal users might log in using IPSEC Remote Access VPN solutions, third parties or internal users on BYOD might use proxies and SSL VPN solutions. If organizations want to allow mobile access, they have to deploy yet another layer of access infrastructure.

Disparate remote access infrastructures pose significant challenges, including limited scalability and agility, high levels of administrative overhead, end-user confusion, and of course, security issues. Visibility into this type of setup is limited, and it’s extremely difficult to uniformly enforce security policies company-wide.

Keeper Connection Manager^® works with nearly any device and granular access controls enable IT administrators to provide end users with just the right level of access from a single application to the entire network. There are no endpoint clients to install, configure or maintain.

Keeper Connection Manager enables administrators to provide IT and DevOps personnel with secure, privileged remote access through RDP, SSH, VNC, MySQL and other common protocols. Fine-grained controls enable administrators to provide access to the entire system – or just one machine. Access can be revoked at any time, and a robust audit trail identifies when and how the system was used.

Market-Leading Security Infrastructure and Policies

Keeper Security holds the longest-standing SOC 2 attestation and ISO 27001 certification in the industry. Keeper utilizes best-in-class security, with a zero-trust framework and zero-knowledge security architecture that protects customer data with multiple layers of encryption keys at the vault, shared folder and record levels.

*Source: Check Point Research Team