Thursday, 5 December 2013
Consumerisation of IT without Risk - There’s no effective risk management without end-to-end security
This is a guest blog post. Views expressed in this post are original thoughts posted by Malcolm Adedeji Orekoya,
Senior Technical Presales Consultant at Network Utilities. These views are his own and in no way do they represent the views of the company he works for.Everything delivered by the IT department nowadays is frequently classified as a service function. With Consumerisation of IT (CoIT), the consumption of these services is affected by the trends in mobility, bring-your-own-device (BYOD) and cloud, which in turn puts pressure on the scalable infrastructure you need.
The number one risk management concern for IT managers with CoIT is security, but in what context? As workers become more mobile, adopting BYOD and accessing corporate applications and information remotely, an IT manager needs to be able to guarantee the access and authentication from these devices is secure - as well as make sure that if these devices are lost or stolen, the information they hold and can access does not end up in the wrong hands.
One way of achieving this is via profiling based on the user, type of device (managed or unmanaged), resources being accessed, location being accessed from and the role of the user. For example, an employee using a corporate device accessing the network remotely and an employee using a personally owned device, accessing the network via the wireless local area network (WLAN), are two distinct profiles that require different policy enforcement.
To minimise risk, authentication (user and device) needs to work with posture checking of endpoints, secure remote access, mobile device management (MDM) and secure wireless connectivity. An end-to-end security infrastructure is required; one that is easy to deploy and manage, as well as one that can provide the performance, access and integration needed. For example, Juniper Networks provides the single Junos Pulse endpoint client, capable of providing secure mobile remote VPN access and network access control (NAC), with role based access control and 802.1x authentication. In addition, the Junos Pulse Mobile Security Suite MDM is purpose-built for mobile devices and provides anti-virus, anti-spam, anti-malware, endpoint firewall, loss and theft protection and endpoint monitoring.
CoIT is not the same as BYOD; it covers the changing trend in the way technology is used. Therefore, cloud services such as storage (Dropbox, Box, Google Drive) and applications (Office365, Salesforce, GoogleApps) - as well as in house developed proprietary applications - all need to be secured within their virtualised environments.
The underlying infrastructure of the virtualised environment and the networking infrastructure (switches, routers, firewalls) needs to provide an end-to-end approach that is secure, scalable and resilient. For example, the single operating system in the Junos OS from Juniper Networks runs across many of its security platforms, allowing administrators to consistently apply policies across the board without having to learn and manage a variety of systems. The innovative technology for securing the virtualisation space is Juniper Networks’ virtual gateway (vGW) product, which focuses on security within the hypervisor and between virtual machines as they communicate in the virtualised platform, as well as outbound. This is a further example of how vendors and manufacturers need to understand the elements that form the foundation of front end resources.
Numerous surveys have shown the impact of the proliferation of personally owned mobile devices onto the enterprise network. One of the impacts of this over the last few years has been the malware threat, and general increase in the amount of cyber threats specifically targeting mobile devices - especially Android devices. Risk management needs to focus beyond managing mobile devices via MDM platforms, to actually securing the corporate data in transit. This involves sandboxing technologies, such as Secure Virtual Workspaces (SVW), which were the initial and most popular solutions in the early days of mobility, to new smarter devices that encrypt data on the devices and in transit, or provide dual boot functionality with physically or logically separated segments on the device.
CoIT is here to stay; we have been talking about these trends for a few years now. If you are managing risk, the next step is to understand the solutions currently available, which will help manage it from end to end.
To find out more on Juniper Networks' vision for an Empowered Enterprise and the solutions available to an organisation, then please visit this site.
The Consumerisation of IT – why organisational change is a must if businesses want to remain competitive
The cultural impact of the consumerisation of IT extends to differing aspects of our lives so we asked Professor Hulme, Lead Director at the Social Furtures Observatory, to write this short blog and video to provide his perspective
The Consumerisation of IT – why organisational change is a must if businesses want to remain competitive
Professor Michael Hulme, Director of Social Futures Observatory and Professor, Lancaster University
The Consumerisation of IT is not just a passing trend. Instead, it is a driver for a fundamental change in the way that organisations will need to structure themselves going forwards. We must recognise that today’s employee comes into the workplace as being much more than just a physical entity, more than just a physical resource. In the past, employees were regarded as ‘units’ within a pre-ordered structural system, a top down authority controlled machine, indeed we even used the language of machines, such as ‘re-engineering’ to describe processes. Individuals had access to computing power, such as PCs, but this access to information was controlled and one physically went to pre-defined spaces to enable it.
Today in our daily lives data and processing come to the individual, presented and interacted with in the formats that best suit each of us as individuals. This is changing the balance of the types of technology that we use in the workplace. Increasingly we expect to use devices that are capable of doing many different things on one device, organising information as best suits each of us, can be held close to us and are at least as equally mobile. These combine to drive new notions of authority and control, replacing old rigid structures with a much more collaborative, fluid and creative form of participation. This is the essence of the Consumerisation of technology in the workplace.
The workplace must respond to this. The employee of the future will be an individual who has grown up surrounded by the digital world and who won’t wait to have to ‘go’ to a device. They expect the information and all their work tools to be present with them as they move through the organisation. Organisations are going to have to meet this more informal, more highly–person centric requirement in the future in order to be commercially successful as it will be key to them ensuring they are able to attract and hire the best talent. To be clear, organisations that operate in rigid, controlled structures that have dominated much of the 20th century and into the 21st century are going to be seriously endangered.
To find out more on Juniper Networks' vision for an Empowered Enterprise and the solutions available to an organisation, then please visit this site.