Network Security Products to Work-from-Home in the Covid-19 World

Author - ISA (Comstar) | Jun 11 2020 11:00

features of network security

Covid-19 is shaping the socio-economic and political reality around us in an unprecedented manner. We now rely on online mediums more than ever for getting health services, pursuing education, and improving businesses. During this pandemic, we have to stay home so that we keep us and our family members safe. Amidst these changes where internet consumption has increased drastically and employees are working-from-home, the concern for stable and secure internet connection and network security becomes indispensable. Working-from-home causes our important office data to be attacked or our websites to be hacked followed by blackmailing calls and other financial loss. To avoid such situations and provide network security at home, various network security products keep the attacker’s detrimental goals at bay. This blog discusses how certain products are efficient in the working-from-home environment, and how they ensure safety, security, and accessibility above all. We interviewed Mr Hassan Bilal (CCIE, RCNA, HCNP, IBM, CAA) from our networking team regarding network security at home to get some insights on why and how which products are more reliable and cost-effective than others, and how our essential dependence on the online sources is thoroughly taken care of using these networks. Below are the questions we asked him along with his responses.

Question: Products specifically catering to work-from-home?

Response: Major products we are using for VPN solutions during Covid-19 include Sophos, Sangfor, and Hillstone. Also, we mostly work on Sophos but in reality, all of these provide utmost security and reliability in work-from-home environments.

Question: Important clients for these products?

Response: Some major clients who contacted us during Covid-19 lockdown for technical support regarding VPN connectivity to connect their employees to the Head Office securely are:

Banking Industry

•    Bank Al Habib
•    JS Bank

Manufacturing Industry

•    Atlas Honda
•    Atlas Engineering
•    Siemens Pakistan

Pharmaceutical Industry

•    Scilife Pharma
•    High Q Pharma
•    Sami Pharma

Question: Location or industries where the product/service is in high demand?

Response: The major sectors that we are catering to include but are not limited to the financial sector, pharmaceutical, automobile industry, food, and other services. We definitely take care of network security and safety in whichever sector it is required. The listed ones are those whom we have already worked for.

Question: What are some of the key problems that our network products solve? And how do we go about solving them? Describe the process?

Response: The key problem or concern all companies now have is how they connect their employees to Head Offices and give them access to office resources while working-from-home, as they would normally access these resources while sitting in the office. We solve this problem by helping our customers who were already using Sophos, Sangfor, and Hillstone Next-Generation Firewall by using one of the major features of these devices i.e. VPN. Sophos provides secure and remote access over the internet using SSL, VPN, or Sophos Connect Client. All these technologies provide secure access from the internet, and whichever suits the customer requirement best is eventually used. Sophos synchronizes security which helps identify users who try to connect with customer networks via the internet. The same goes for Sangfor and Hillstone.

Question: Three key features of the product?

Response: Security, Availability, Superior performance

Question: Why a client prefers our network products over others?

Response: Normally, if we talk about Sophos NGFW, it is the most cost-effective solution that provides you security for your networks, local users, remote users, and services hosted on your network with rich reporting. So, yeah low cost with all available features increases the demand for our network products.

Question: How our product increases efficiency, reliability, and productivity?

Response: The major concern customers have while using tools like VPN is their performance degradation which happens on current networks while running different applications. Sophos solves these problems by providing secured connectivity with the very low requirement from system resources, so when using VPN the Network Administrator does not feel any performance degradation on the network. That’s how we solve various other network problems as well because our products require less dependence on system resources and maintain network performance without degradation.

Question: How our team implements the project and how the team’s collaboration helps in that?

Response: Normally, VPN connectivity is configured by deploying firewalls at the customer’s site, but most customers were not using VPN features before Covid-19 lockdown so its demand increased significantly. During the lockdown, we configured and provided support remotely, in some cases where remote access was not possible our team also visited clients to configure VPN.

Thus, in a nutshell, considering Mr Hassan’s expertise and insights, products such as Sophos, Sangfor, and Hillstone are vital to bringing network security both in offices and homes. These products along with VPN also provide employees with remote access to all head office resources in a locked-down world of Covid-19. Lastly, Mr Hassan also highlighted Sophos products cost-effectiveness, minimum dependence on local resources, and a thorough approach towards no performance degradation, thanks to unique security features for local users, remote users, and networks.

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