A report from Duo Security at Cisco, a leading multi-factor authentication (MFA) and secure access provider, has revealed the IT change organisations underwent this year during a shift to remote work, accelerating adoption of cloud technology.
According to the company, the security implications of this transition will “reverberate for years to come.”
The report details how organisations, with a mandate to rapidly transition their entire workforce to remote, turned to remote access technologies such as virtual private networks (VPN) and remote desktop protocol (RDP), among numerous other efforts. As a result, authentication activity to these technologies increased 60 per cent, helping propel Duo’s monthly authentications from 600 million to 900 million per month.
A complementary Cisco survey recently found that 96 per cent of organisations made cybersecurity policy changes during the pandemic, with more than half implementing MFA.
Cloud adoption also accelerated, the report found. Daily authentications to cloud applications surged 40 per during the first few months of the pandemic, the bulk of which came from enterprise and mid-sized organisations looking to ensure secure access to various cloud services.
As organisations scrambled to acquire the requisite equipment to support remote work, the company found employees relied on personal or unmanaged devices in the interim. Consequently, blocked access attempts due to out-of-date devices increased 90 per cent in March. That figure fell in April, indicating healthier devices and decreased risk of breach due to malware.
“As the pandemic began, the priority for many organisations was keeping the lights on and accepting risk in order to accomplish this end,” said Dave Lewis, global advisory CISO, Duo Security at Cisco. “Attention has now turned towards lessening risk by implementing a more mature and modern security approach that accounts for a traditional corporate perimeter that has been completely upended.”
The report also found that Apple devices were 3.5 times more likely to update quickly vs Android to fix “critical vulnerabilities” and the prevalence of SIM-swapping attacks has driven organisations to strengthen their authentication schemes.
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