Splashtalks Recap: Zero Trust & Reinventing the Secure Workspace
In our new podcast, Italo Nava, our Senior Director of Sales and Customer Success, sits down with Susan Li, Senior Director of Product Management, and Yanlin Wang, the Vice President of Advanced Technology, to discuss the development of Splashtop Secure Workspace.
In this article, we break down what a secure workspace is, the vision behind Splashtop Secure Workspace, and what the future holds in terms of cybersecurity and AI.
What is a Secure Workspace?
A secure workspace is the technological infrastructure implemented by an organization to ensure that everyday data practices keep information and data secure. This could be the policy put in place to establish how a team handles threats or to how simple or how complex a password needs to be. All of these things combine together to create a secure workspace.
“The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated a hybrid working environment, so there’s increasing need to secure workspaces everywhere,” Li states.
The introduction of a hybrid work environment has further complicated the already challenging role of today's IT professionals. They are tasked with managing a variety of issues, including user provisioning, de-provisioning, onboarding, and the integration of multiple, often incompatible, solutions. The need for stringent compliance, resource protection against leaks and attacks, and enhanced visibility remain paramount.
Additionally, the complexities of budgeting for and managing numerous, overlapping access and security tools have increased. These challenges are exacerbated by the dynamic nature of cybersecurity threats, influenced by geopolitical uncertainties and the growth of organized cybercrime. The result is a landscape that often leaves IT leaders struggling. To create a more holistic product in regard to secure access, the Splashtop team developed Splashtop Secure Workspace.
“We wanted to give our customers the ability to solve their IT problems and their security problems in a really simplified way,” Wang says. “We want it to be a really scalable solution so that we can lower our customers’ costs.”
What is the Vision Behind Splashtop Secure Workspace?
In 2021, CEO Mark Lee gathered a team in his backyard to brainstorm how they can help businesses get a better user experience regarding remote access. Setting up remote access requires a lot of software, knowledge, and infrastructure. It’s not uncommon to see a technician managing 3,000 devices and managing this infrastructure.
The goal of Splashtop Secure Workspace is to simplify the process for these end users to gain access.
“There’s vulnerability in every stack of the network—from the network level, to systems, to applications and data,” Li states. “Smaller businesses often don’t have sophisticated resources to defend and protect themselves from attacks. To protect them, we needed to bring a lot of specialized tools together onto one platform and make the solution easy to consume.”
These smaller businesses may unintentionally over-engineer their own solutions, such as in-house firewalls, and ensure IDPs work with their VPNs. While all this infrastructure is important and necessary, the process is complex and intricate and requires a lot of know-how.
Instead of viewing this process as individual layers of security, the Splashtop team decided to rethink the security technology stack in terms of access. Thinking about how individual people can access data was their first step to simplifying security. While security is often thought of in terms of barriers, they were thinking more about how it can enable teams to provide access to the right people.
Securing Workspaces with Third-Party Teams
Partnering with third-party teams, companies, and contractors can introduce your organization to some risk. Working with these individuals often requires you to provide them with access to secure accounts, but what’s the best way to do that? You can provide them with their own account, or you can give them credentials to an already existing account.
“Provisioning and deprovisioning creates a lot of burden for IT teams. The moment an organization is the most vulnerable is when a project ends,” Li states. “The accounts the third-party user created for access then becomes an orphaned account which becomes a risk for that organization.”
Sharing credentials is also not a secure way to provide access. How do you enable third-party access in a way that ensures security? Most people will just write down a username and password on a post-it note. After that, what happens to the note is up to the individual who requires access.
The Splashtop team worked to solve this problem and make it simple to grant specific individuals access when they need it.
“It’s as simple as sharing a link,” Li says. With Splashtop Secure Workspace, individuals who are requesting access don’t need an account or a password—they use a custom URL to access an account and third-party users will be able to request access via that URL which expires at a specified time. Third-party users won’t have to create an entirely new log-in and account owners don’t have to share credentials at all.
How Splashtop is Using AI for a Secure Workspace
“Splashtop Secure Workspace is a system that will help facilitate the usage of Generative AI,” explains Wang. “When you use generative AI, you can see data access problems, system access problems—imagine all of that is gone by just adopting Splashtop Secure Workspace. You don’t necessarily have to set up a whole system or a private language learning model (LLM) system; you can automate everything through Splashtop Secure Workspace.”
Another angle the team is looking at AI is for pattern detection. Generative AI takes information and translates its sequences into a type of signal, kind of like language translation.
“In the access business, people log in, use a certain application, type some command—that’s a sequence of events. That sequence of events can be translated or transformed into anomaly detection,” Wang explains. “That technology is the kind we need in terms of security and response.”
Secure Your Workspace with Splashtop
Security is not just a set it and forget it experience—it’s a holistic mindset that requires a lot of thought and future planning. With systems like Splashtop Secure Workspace, your team can provide a secure digital environment for employees, while allowing secure third-party access to other vendors. Splashtop Secure Workspace can help to provide the foundation for language learning models, and AI, but also the foundation to scale your team for growth.
Interested in learning about how you can adopt more streamlined security practices and provide secure third-party access? Discover how Splashtop Secure Workspace can help redefine your team’s approach to security and streamline your processes.
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