CrowdStrike Joins with Netskope, Okta and Proofpoint to Secure Remote Work Anytime and Anywhere at Scale

CrowdStrike, Netskope, Okta and Proofpoint are joining together to help better safeguard organizations by delivering an integrated, Zero Trust security strategy that is designed to protect today’s dynamic and remote working environments at scale.

The sudden shift to a remote workforce due to the COVID-19 pandemic has driven many organizations to accelerate their multi-year digital transformation plans and increase their focus on areas such as remote collaboration and corporate access; sales and customer service changes due to different buying behaviors; and critical cloud infrastructure and security. To optimize these areas, an organization’s entire digital strategy must be architected and deployed at speed — without compromising business continuity. 

However, this rapid transition has also forced security and IT teams to find more robust security solutions quickly — with fewer resources and without the practical guidance they need to execute successfully. This integration across products is designed to simplify tasks for security and IT teams and help organizations overcome the obstacles they face in ensuring comprehensive protection across their remote workforces.

Crowdstrike, Netskope, Okta and Proofpoint make remote work as simple and secure as on-premises work.

  • CrowdStrike protects all endpoints that access the enterprise, providing advanced threat hunting, next-generation antivirus protection, and tools for proactive incident response.
  • Netskope provides web, cloud and data-centric security to protect enterprise assets anywhere, and delivers contextual understanding that helps you secure proprietary information everywhere. 
  • Okta establishes Zero Trust that securely connects the right people to the right technologies and secures frictionless access for remote and on-premises teams, enabled by an intuitive single sign-on and powered by adaptive multifactor authentication.
  • Proofpoint protects against today’s complex people-based attacks, defending against phishing, malware and other workforce attacks with deep visibility and behavioral training.

Challenges in Securing a Remote Workforce 

Increased Attack Surface 

With the growing sophistication of cyber threats and the fact that working remotely increases attack surfaces, security solutions designed for an office-based corporate environment are no longer effective. Securing a remote workforce requires a strong layered defense approach and a modern Zero Trust security architecture to help keep organizations’ users, endpoints, data and networks safe from modern attacks. Everything from access controls to device posture to monitoring and remediation has to be highly coordinated to ensure a strong security stack that provides resiliency and flexibility without compromising productivity. 

Lack of Training

Given the speed of change required by shelter-in-place directives, companies have been forced to allow workers to use their personal devices in lieu of company-provided assets, and also ensure they could access corporate assets, data and hundreds of apps from anywhere in the world. 

However, many organizations are struggling to provide the same level of security and access to their newly remote workforce, along with the same seamless experience their employees are used to — and it is becoming increasingly clear that many organizations lack adequate awareness of the cybersecurity threats facing a remote workforce. 

According to CrowdStrike’s recent Work Security Index global survey, 53% of respondents were not provided with any additional cybersecurity training on the risks associated with remote work, and for small businesses, 69% of respondents reported having received no additional cybersecurity training. 

Compliance Challenges

At the same time, compliance requirements in regulated industries still need to be met. The number of collaboration channels and the amount of cloud data dispersed within and across software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications have increased exponentially, leaving sensitive data unprotected and exposed to cyberattacks. Netskope Threat Labs found that 20% of users have sensitive data moving between cloud apps — and even more concerning, 37% of this sensitive data is involved in data loss prevention (DLP) violations.

Lack of Comprehensive Scalable Security Across Remote Workforces

According to 451 Research’s Voice of the Enterprise: Digital Pulse Coronavirus Flash Survey (March 2020), 38% of organizations expect expanded or universal work from home to continue long term. But while organizations are looking for cost-effective, scalable solutions for their dynamic workforces, adversaries are as relentless as ever, employing social engineering phishing tactics and sophisticated ransomware that uses hard-to-detect “living off the land” (LOTL) techniques. 

Solution that Simplifies Zero Trust Security 

Another facet of this joint solution is that it will fundamentally change the way organizations approach Zero Trust security architecture. By joining together, these security leaders are bringing a comprehensive, best-of-breed security stack to your organization to enable your IT and security teams to secure every remote workforce — regardless of app, data, endpoint or location. Through these integrations, you can help keep your distributed workforce productive, collaborative and in compliance by hardening your defenses against today’s sophisticated attacks. 

Integrated Solution Benefits

This “better together” integrated solution from CrowdStrike, Netskope, Okta and Proofpoint delivers several important benefits for organizations of any size. It allows you to:

Provide safe access to applications and data, from anywhere, on any device.
Organizations can move beyond legacy VPNs for remote network access with this modern, secure application-specific solution. Netskope and Proofpoint replace VPNs and enable Zero Trust network access (ZTNA), Okta enables modern identity and access management, and CrowdStrike embeds strong endpoint security to secure applications and network resources. You’ll reduce the attack surface by adhering to Zero Trust access for all users.

Add layers of data protection with enhanced cloud and web security.
You’ll gain a comprehensive understanding of where data is within your cloud and web environment, regardless of device, network or location. The integrated solution provides extra layers of protection when users browse the web or use cloud apps, and also provides visibility into potentially risky behaviors, now that corporate resources are more easily accessible and more of your employees are working remotely. With strong DLP and data protection solutions from Proofpoint and Netskope combined with identity and device controls from Okta and CrowdStrike, organizations can defend against cyber threats and meet compliance requirements.

Strengthen and integrate endpoint security.
This solution allows you to enhance security for all endpoints and integrate threat signals to quickly detect and respond. It combines strong endpoint security from CrowdStrike with identity and data security from Okta and Netskope to protect against breaches, malware-free attacks, and known and unknown malware.

Take a proactive approach to defense and streamline remediation.
With this solution in place, you can exchange threat forensics between Netskope and CrowdStrike  to enhance your organization’s security posture and provide you with enhanced visibility and protection. The integration streamlines shared intelligence across tools, automates response workflows and takes a proactive approach to defense in depth.

Make the end user an asset to your security team.
Educate end users on modern threats and the best ways to respond, while ensuring their access to IT tools and apps are uninterrupted. Turn your users into a strong last line of defense — regardless of where they work — with security awareness training. 

Unrivaled Protection Across Your Remote Workforce

Together, CrowdStrike, Okta, Netskope and Proofpoint provide you with a powerful, proactive approach to enterprise defense, ensuring that you seamlessly share intelligence, exchange forensic data, automate threat response and continually evolve to future-proof your organization’s overall security posture.

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