Cloudflare: Long-term Connectivity for Remote Workers
When COVID-19 forced a sudden transition to remote work, several companies scrambled to keep their employees connected. While some solutions were strategic, others were temporary:
- Reinforcing slow, unreliable VPNs
- Creating “split tunnels” for internet traffic.
- Implementing tricks for granting remote access.
However, the cracks in these partial solutions are now becoming visible, as the challenges involving visibility, security, and complexity persist.
Why is Cloudflare Zero Trust the solution?
- This platform offers endless alternatives and benefits for companies who have decided to adopt a new work model:
- Self-hosted apps
- SaaS apps
- Global Edge Network
- Smart routing
- World’s fastest resolver
- Single-pass inspection
- Single-pane management - Remote worker
- Internet gateway
- Browser isolation
- Secure access
- Internet apps
Zero Trust security platforms reduce remote work risks by enforcing identity and context-based authentication on every request to your corporate apps, leaving little room for lateral movement.
1. Increase visibility
It was straightforward to maintain activity logs when users were in the office, but maintaining an audit trail is much more difficult when employees are geographically distributed and working from new devices. Logging capabilities within SaaS applications are often inconsistent, and VPN logs can be difficult to parse.
Zero Trust platforms restore visibility by intercepting and logging requests from all remote devices — even unmanaged devices. Administrators can monitor remote worker activity in internally-hosted and SaaS apps, with an audit trail to investigate incidents.
Logs are centralized in one dashboard, and automatically sent to the SIEM of choice.
2. Eliminate complexity
Band-aid solutions implemented to connect remote workers are proving to be too fragile for the long run. Administrators are left to manage traffic filtering policies across multiple incompatible tools, and users are frustrated by the sluggish performance.
Zero Trust platforms:
- Simplify how users connect
- Streamline how administrators work
- Reduce reliance on legacy VPNs
- Apply standard security controls to all traffic
- regardless of how that connection starts or where in the network stack it lives
- Manage policies from a single dashboard
Learn about security on Zero Trust platforms
- The goal is to prevent loss of data in SaaS applications
- Each remote worker can request a Workday
- Gateway policies isolate traffic and disable copy/paste on page
- User logs in with SSO credentials and required hard-key token
- Gateway portal connection is required for authentication
- Browser session is isolated in read only mode
- Logs user, device, location, and request details
In a single-pass architecture, remote worker traffic is inspected, isolated, logged, and secured from Internet threats; and performance never suffers, as users connect to data centers just one short hop nearby.
