Bring Your Own PC Security would become one of the pandemic-induced trends that leave a transformational impact within the next decade, said Gartner recently.
“Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, there was little interest in BYOPC,” said Rob Smith, senior research director at Gartner. “At the start of the pandemic, organisations simply had no other alternative. The urgent need to enable employees to work from home and a lack of available hardware bolstered its adoption globally. Gartner clients said their adoption of BYOPC is up from less than 5% in 2019.”
The risk posed by BYPOC security
However, BYOPCs are often infected with malware or ransomware and fall victim to phishing attacks, Gartner pointed out.
As a result, there’s a need for companies to limit and control access by offsetting the PC hardware investment with critical security technologies such as multi-factor authentication (MFA), cloud access security broker (CASB), zero trust network access (ZTNA), virtual desktop infrastructure, and desktop as a service, the research firm noted.
“Without investment in these technologies, organisations face a much higher potential cost in the form of ransomware,” said Smith.
In addition, secure access service edge (SASE) is another technology that business leaders need to watch.
At the peak this year, SASE allows any endpoint to access any application over any network in a protected manner, Gartner observed.
Though SASE is relatively new, the pandemic has fostered the need for business continuity plans that include flexible, anywhere, anytime, secure remote access, at scale, even from untrusted devices, said Joe Skorupa, distinguished research vice president at Gartner.
“As SASE services are cloud-native — dynamically scalable, globally accessible, multi-tenant and including zero trust network access, they are driving its rapid adoption. Over the last three months, SASE has been adopted by more than 40% of global remote workers,” Skorupa noted.
