Absolute
Software announced unique insights into the increased risk exposure
organizations are facing amid the continued shift from ‘work from home' to
‘work from anywhere.'
A new
report, titled ‘The Value of Zero Trust in a
Work-from-Anywhere World,'
revealed the average Absolute-enabled enterprise device connected from at least
four separate locations in March 2022 - representing an 18 percent jump from
January to March alone, and emphasizing the increasingly mobile nature of
today's hybrid workers. Absolute's analysis also found 16 percent of enterprise
devices to be unencrypted, and 77 days out of date with current patching on
average, highlighting both the fragility of critical security controls and the
need for resilient security tools to protect remote devices, data, and network
connections.
IT and
Security leaders continue to face significant challenges when it comes to
balancing the need to minimize risk exposure with the need to provide seamless,
secure employee access no matter where they are connecting from. In a recent survey, 42 percent reported that managing risk
is the biggest drawback of remote and hybrid working.
A resilient
Zero Trust security approach enables IT teams to go beyond securing and
validating every connection to the corporate network and extend their
contextual parameters to take into account the security posture of an endpoint
device.
"The shift
to remote and hybrid work has changed the nature of endpoint and network
security indefinitely, and has brought Zero Trust heavily into focus," said
Christy Wyatt, President and CEO of Absolute. "But implementing a Zero Trust
security strategy cannot be accomplished in one fell swoop, with the purchase
of a clearly defined set of tools; there is not a one-size-fits-all approach.
Every organization should be re-imagining their Zero Trust architectures to
start with the endpoint, capable of extending from device firmware to the
network edge - and with a clear focus on resilience."
Among other
notable findings, Absolute's report includes an in-depth look at the health and
performance of five critical endpoint security controls - such as Unified
Endpoint Management (UEM) solutions, Endpoint Protection Platforms (EPPs), and
Virtual Private Networks (VPNs), among others. Those without the ability to
autonomously self-heal via Absolute's Application Persistence service showed compliance rates as low as 27
percent over a two-week period, while those with Application Persistence
enabled consistently reported compliance rates above 90 percent.
To read the
full report, ‘The Value of Zero Trust in a Work-from-Anywhere World,' visit here.