ACCESS CONTROL: Going Mobile, Going Perilous

It’s a new conflict and enterprise challenge – how to securely control access for mobile workers, including the security staff and security data.

Only a short time ago, being a mobile worker simply meant that one didn’t work in the same conventional office space shared by most company employees. Instead, this kind of mobile worker likely worked remotely at a home office or occasionally at a coffee shop with Wi-Fi access or some other fixed location. Because work locations and networks were predictable and fixed, the security needed to support these mobile workers was straightforward. It simply required providing a solid means of authentication and a good, conventional virtual private network (VPN) and the job was done.
 

There is a distinct and rapidly growing population of workers who are much more literally mobile – spending a majority of their work day moving from place to place, network to network and sometimes even from one device to another. This group now includes the chief security officer and his or her security officers. In fact, research firm IDC forecasts that such truly mobile workers will comprise as much as 70 percent of the U.S. workforce by 2009. The security issues such a workforce presents are worthy of some pretty serious attention.