More secure remote access and WFH for enterprises?

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Editor’s brief: In the pandemic season, the governments worldwide began to lock down their people in their homes, insisting on “work from home (WFH)” as the primary mode of work. WFH is certainly far from ideal. It has been increasingly shown that WFH, especially in tightly congested cities and states where many people in families are cramped in tight spaces, each contesting for a slice of the table or time to do office work on laptops or videoconferencing. WFH is certainly less productive and more stressful, already attributed to an escalation of mental health and wellness disorders worldwide. What’s worse, home IT networks are seldom secure, with home WIFI routers and devices easily breached, as seen by the increase in hacking during the COVID-19 season. What then, could businesses consider in empowering remote employees working from home to stay secure? Check Point’s recent acquisition of Odo Security into its extensive and proven Infinity architecture might give some hints. Read more below.

SINGAPORE Check Point® Software Technologies Ltd. (NASDAQ: CHKP), a leading provider of cyber security solutions globally, today announced the acquisition of a new cloud-based technology that delivers secure remote access created by Odo Security. This technology will integrate with Check Point´s  Infinity architecture, and become the easiest and most secure solution for enterprises need to enable employees´ secure remote access to any application.

The Covid-19 pandemic has driven enterprise adoption of mass remote working for their global workforces, from 30% before the pandemic to 81% today. Seventy-four percent plan to enable large-scale remote working permanently.  However, many organisations overlooked critical aspects of security in the race to enable remote working, which significantly increased their exposure to cyber-attacks. Now more than ever, organisations need to secure remote connectivity anytime, anywhere to any resource.

“Many organisations find themselves compromising security in order to deliver the connectivity required by their business needs,” said Dr. Dorit Dor, VP of Products, Check Point Software Technologies “By incorporating Odo Security’s unique clientless, cloud-delivered secure remote access to our portfolio of threat prevention services, we help organisations overcome this dilemma. Check Point delivers a consolidated solution to help organisations to securely connect any number of remote employees to everything, from any location, making working from home easier and safer than ever”.

Odo Security, an Israeli start-up founded in 2017, developed a cloud-based, clientless secure access service edge (SASE) technology that delivers secure remote access. Unlike traditional secure remote access solutions, this technology enables:

  • Users to easily connect through a unified portal to a wide range of applications, such as remote desktops, web applications, database servers, cloud and corporate servers, with no client or software installation.
  • Security administrators to easily deploy the solution in less than five minutes from the cloud. They also gain enhanced visibility including full audit trail of user activity.
  • Zero Trust Architecture to define granular access policy to give the right people in the right context, the least privileged access to applications and reduce the attack surface.

Check Point will integrate Odo Security’s technology into its Infinity architecture and SASE vision. This consolidated solution will deliver the easiest secure remote access with unmatched security, based on NSS top-rated threat prevention security services. The transaction is expected to be closed within a week.

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