Looking back over the last two years, it’s remarkable to think how much the world has changed. Even as organizations start to consider how and when to bring their employees back to the office – if at all – it’s clear that people will continue to work from home or while out on the road in record numbers.
There are always going to be pros and cons when employees work from home versus working from an office. On the positive side, commute times can be reduced, and employees often gain more control over their schedules. From an IT and security perspective, however, the distributed nature of today’s workforce has opened up a pandora’s box of potential issues, not least of which is the increased risk of a hack.
This is where Absolute comes in. For several years, the company has been preparing for a mobile-first future where employees connect to data, applications and services from any location, using a variety of Wi-Fi and cellular networks. With its acquisition of NetMotion Software in July, the Absolute and NetMotion engineering teams’ first priority has been to add Absolute’s Persistence technology to NetMotion’s Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA).
The result? A zero trust remote access solution that is not only self-healing, it is also undeletable. In practical terms, this means that IT or security teams can now set policies on endpoint devices that will protect the NetMotion software from being misconfigured, tampered with or removed by the user.
The power of resilience
The security of an organization is only as strong as its weakest link. Likewise, any form of defense that lives on an endpoint can only be effective if it remains operational, and functions as intended. Oftentimes employees can unintentionally compromise the integrity and efficacy of these security applications by doing something as simple as installing an unsupported third-party application on their work device. And with phishing and other attacks becoming more widespread, bad actors have proven to be incredibly creative when exploiting vulnerabilities or human error to bypass controls and maliciously disable security applications.
Adding Absolute, however, completely changes the narrative. Built into the firmware of more than 500 million endpoint devices, Absolute’s proprietary Application PersistenceTM technology is already being leveraged to monitor the health and behavior of critical security applications. Now, applying this technology to NetMotion means that if someone were to uninstall the software from a device for any reason, or if malware were to compromise the integrity of the application, an admin is able to pre-emptively set up policies that will automatically fix or reinstall the solution when the device restarts.
Resilient ZTNA
With so many devices today being used outside the organization’s protected network, visibility has become a huge problem. IT teams run the risk of having their security solutions bypassed or disabled, without even knowing that it has happened.
So it stands to reason that the combination of Absolute’s persistence technology with NetMotion’s zero trust capabilities has enormous importance for customers looking for a turnkey remote access solution for their distributed workforce. With organizations today rapidly turning their attention to zero trust solutions as a means to protect employees and valuable data, having a reliable and undeletable solution becomes one less thing to worry about.
In addition to enabling automatic repair and reinstallation of the NetMotion software, any changes that occur are flagged to admins, who can quickly investigate or remediate the situation, protecting users and sensitive data.
The first of many milestones
In the past three months alone, the Absolute and NetMotion engineering teams have created a product integration that will benefit countless customers and end-users around the world. What’s even more encouraging is that this is just one of many changes coming in the Absolute + NetMotion product roadmap. The goal will continue to be to enable organizations with a zero trust, resilient platform that brings the highest levels of security and productivity to our Work-from-Anywhere workforce. For more information on the NetMotion Absolute integration, please feel free to contact us, or join our November 8th webinar on the subject.
