With the 17th annual National Cybersecurity Awareness Month (NCSAM) underway, it is critical that every organization in the IT Channel does their part to #BeCyberSmart. This year more than ever, cybersecurity training and implementation of cybersecurity best practices need to be put into place due to the changing landscape.
There have been many implications in the eight months since the pandemic shut down the country. Organizations in every industry were forced to rethink their workforce and learn how to create a remote environment. Today, knowing that some sort of remote or hybrid environment will exist for the near future, securing the endpoint devices, the network, and the cloud have now taken center stage.
The EDGE360 editorial team recently sat down with Evan Bell, Product Business Manager for Cisco Security at SYNNEX Comstor, to discuss how they are helping VARs through cybersecurity training and education.
“It’s not news to anyone that these are unprecedented times with business as more organizations have created a remote or hybrid model,” Bell said. “Defending a remote network requires a different way of thinking now that employees are not behind their corporate network.”
In addition to this element of change in the workplace, cybercriminals are on the rise. The Atlantic recently reported that the pandemic has fostered an online boom of internet crime. “The Internet Crime Complaint Center at America’s Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) reports that by June, daily digital crime had risen by 75 percent since the start of stay-at-home restrictions and that the number of complaints received in 2020 had all but surpassed the total for 2019.”
The ongoing changes of increased remote staff, the number of new devices connecting to the network through unsecured internet connections, and managing data securely on different clouds, requires more cybersecurity training, according to Bell. “Standing up a proper security stance in today’s environment seems nearly impossible,” he said. “That’s why SYNNEX Comstor is working with partners to educate them on Cisco’s powerful end-to-end security portfolio and how to implement these tools combined with proven security practices. We want to make it easier for the partner community to do their part.”
Bell points to several areas where the new remote environment has opened vulnerabilities that need to be addressed. Endpoint security is one of the biggest, as employees and students are all using devices at home without the same level of restriction that occurs on-premise. Additionally, identity authentication has become critical for users that are requesting access to the network remotely. “Cisco offers multi-factor authentication to verify that identity when DUO is implemented on the endpoint device. This verifies the user, the device, and access to the application.”
Now is the time that everyone must do their part on cybersecurity training and education, Bell noted. His team at SYNNEX Comstor has launched several trainings to get partners up to speed on the changing environment and the Cisco solutions that can help customers protect their networks, endpoints, and users.
Watch Evan Bell discuss this and more in this video. Register for the next security-focused SYNNEX Comstor EDGE Training here.
