Since the onset of the pandemic in early 2020, there have been increasing reports of “break-ins” by bad actors all over the globe. Ransomware, hacks, and the shutdown of critical systems have become all too common occurrences that owners of businesses of all sizes must pay close attention to. Notable failures in security include companies, utilities, and even local governments just to name a few.
2020 introduced a lot of intriguing new challenges to an already complicated technology landscape. On-premises IT departments that were used to protecting endpoints behind a company firewall in a physical office were forced within a matter of days to rethink this paradigm. They were forced to develop new workflows and deploy systems and software on compressed timelines with limited resources.
In this article, we explore one important method for protecting your corporate datacenter, a VPN. Virtual private networks (VPNs) are the industry standard method for providing remote access to an organization’s internal, on-premises applications. A VPN essentially creates a private, encrypted tunnel for an off-site user to connect to applications in a corporate data center.
VPNs are great too, but they by themselves are not a silver bullet. Even with the use of a virtual private network, organizations that leverage only a username and password to log in could be exposed to data breaches if those user credentials are somehow compromised.
Protecting your organization’s VPN against user credential theft with multi-factor authentication (MFA) adds an additional layer of defense. When defenses are layered in-depth, you can:
- Verify all users accessing your organization’s applications or cloud files
- Protect against phishing threats
- Reduce the risk of data breaches
- Establish a consistent login process for both VPN and cloud services
- Gain insights into user’s access devices, and more
Contact one of our team members at VIP IT to request an audit of your security posture. Gain some valuable insight into the important benefits of multi-factor authentication and learn how using it in combination with VPN as a best practice will improve your organization’s security and reduce the possibility of a data breach.
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