Work for many of today's employees is no longer the
traditional nine-to-five day or the office environment, writes
Eldar Tuvey, CEO of ScanSafe.
In an age of high-speed internet communications, more and more
people can
travel routinely for work or telecommute from home.
For many, it's hard to tell when the work day begins and ends,
especially when travelling for business. Who hasn't entered that
grey area of working on the road, after hours, and checking the
personal e-mail account or latest news headlines on their
corporate-issued laptop?
IDC
estimates that there will be a billion mobile workers by 2011.
That presents serious implications for security managers.
The biggest risk comes from users who surf the web unprotected
while on the road and return to the office with infected laptops
that can vandalise the corporate network. Roaming workers are more
likely to violate corporate internet usage policies, treating their
laptop as a personal device outside work hours.
In a recent survey among our customer base, 65% reported
instances of roaming workers tampering with or disabling security
features on their laptop when working remotely. And 40% said they
had been hit by a security threat as a result.
One misconception is that the corporate
virtual private
network (VPN) will protect roaming users. Unfortunately, VPNs
are not the cure-all that many security professionals assume. One
obvious VPN shortcoming is that it only works when it is turned on!
Traditionally, mobile security has been addressed from the
client side (desktop anti-virus solutions) or the server side
(http://www.computerweekly.com/Articles/2007/07/12/225516/web-security-gateways-meet-rising-malware-threats.htm
URL filtering software and/or appliances deployed in the
DMZ).
Desktop anti-virus only protects against known malware for which
a
signature exists. Anti-virus solutions do not filter content
and cannot enforce an internet usage policy. Client-based
anti-virus software requires constant updating and is a drain on PC
performance, often frustrating users so much they disable it.
Appliance-based solutions only offer URL filtering and do not
protect against malware. These solutions typically crawl the web to
build databases of known "bad" URLs to identify unwanted web
traffic rather than actually scanning each web page in real-time to
identify malware. They often miss many new exploits, leaving users
unprotected.
To protect roaming users properly, a solution should provide an
elastic security perimeter that moves with the employee without
introducing latency, increased bandwidth costs or requiring
constant updating.
Software as a service (SaaS) solutions are ideal because all
the heavy lifting is done
"in the cloud".
SaaS solutions seamlessly extend corporate security policy to
hotels, airports, homes or anywhere else employees use their
laptops. The scanning of web content is done in real-time and
there's nothing to deploy. SaaS solutions merely require traffic be
redirected to take advantage of the service provider's global
network. This eliminates the need for IT staff to manage and update
a premise- or client-based solution.
The world is getting smaller, demanding that people work any
time, anywhere. Security services need to keep up.
Eldar Tuvey is CEO of security-as-a-service company
ScanSafe
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