|  2020 The Year of Living Dangerously  |

This multi-part series is designed to provide a deeper understanding of the threats that your organization and its data face. As we speak to customers and partners, we see gaps in understanding when it comes to data security. Our goal is to educate our readers to understand the broad threat to your organization derived from your data, and drill down to show the interdependencies and connections to help you take a holistic view of protecting your data.

The year 2020 saw a massive change in social behavior that created an equally massive increase in cybersecurity risk. Virtually overnight enterprises of all sizes permitted or directed most of their workforce to abandon the office and work from home. This change cut across all sectors of the economy to include virtually every job that did not require physical labor and obliterated the concept of the well-defended network perimeter. That was replaced with the reality that a company’s network defense was suddenly no more effective than the security on the least protected device in use by any employee. Your network is now no more secure than your employee’s home router.

No matter how good your team is, it is more likely than not that your important data is more at risk in January 2021 than it was a year ago. The conventional wisdom and modern-day “best practices” focus on intrusion prevention and intrusion detection. Today, your employee’s home routers are inside your “perimeter.” How are you preventing and detecting intrusions there? Or on the cell phone, your employee is using as an access point when they need to get out of the house?

Polymer protects your data when your trusted user is not the user you trust. If your employee leaves their computer on, it could be used by someone other than your employee. With Polymer, this does not matter. Polymer requires a second device, typically a cell phone, for two-factor authorization. Even if someone else uses your employee’s computer, they will not access Polymer protected data.

Unfortunately, many people fail to take even the minimum steps necessary to secure their home networks. If ever, some rarely change their router default settings, including the router password leaving the device extremely easy to defeat. Polymer prevents unauthorized access to protected data even when the router has been breached. In addition to requiring two-factor authentication, Polymer employs User/Entity Behavior Analytics (UEBA) to detect data access attempts that are abnormal. Polymer shuts them down cold when such attempts are made, preventing access and alerting the response team that an attack was attempted.

There is a higher probability that company data can be lost through theft when such data, or access to it, is kept at an employee’s home. Fortunately, with Polymer, theft of your employee’s computer does not mean the thieves get your company data. They only get the unintelligible gibberish that is the product of industry-leading encryption technology.

At Covax Data, we assume your network will be compromised, or an insider will become a threat. We have designed our flagship product, Polymer, to protect your data even when your network is compromised and when insiders act like an outsider. Now is the time to stop living dangerously.

Originally Posted On: February 1, 2021