Maintaining Azure security during the coronavirus crisis

For nearly two months—and for some in Italy and China, even longer—organizations around the world have adapted to a new landscape for work, hosting meetings virtually and shifting to work from home to "flatten the curve" of infections in the Covid-19 pandemic. This dramatic shift away from commuting and in-office work has profoundly changed the way that many organizations do business. But what about its impact on cybersecurity? MSDW reached out to professionals in the field to get a sense of how the pandemic is unfolding in the threat landscape.

Customers: Caught in the crossfire

Work remote means that employees are no longer within the more controlled network environments of a company office. Attack surfaces are potentially broadening as more people work on their own devices on less secure home wi-fi networks or at-best using technology like VPNs to connect.

Speaking on a recent episode of the MSDW Podcast, Pete Loach from DXC Technology  explained that client-based VPN provides both a security and a user experience advantage: 

VPN allows you to open up internal resources that you don't necessarily want to open to public internet access...These might be housed on an internal machine or cloud-based that has a tunnel going from your VPN to the network and then to the cloud solution But it's ensuring that solution stays private within your company and not accessible [easily] to the outside world. It also allows the user to have an in-the-office feel no matter where they are. It makes the team member's experience much more robust with relatively simple effort.

Gavin Hill, VP of Datacenter and Cloud Security at Bitdefender told MSDW that COVID-19 has ramped up the demand for tools like VPN: