Controlling Mobile workforce against data losses
Do you manage a workforce, who are supposed to travel in order to support your business?
Yes, we are talking about your sales force, support team, partners and other business travelers of your organization. It was alright when they just used to work on physical papers. In fact, it was even alright when you had few low end phones and desktops. Because, they can not carry the desktops everywhere they go and the low end mobile phones can not store data. So, really never had the risk of data loss!
But, what about now?
Technology and competition to build better products have given rise to a number of devices which makes a business network more efficient and productive. Last decade saw a significant improvements in laptop designs, smaller version of laptops, netbooks, smart phones and PDAs and will continue to do so with evolving technology. But, regarding the increased risk of data loss, this was not a very big problem as security companies offered a wide range of solutions.
You can set up a lot of IT security solutions to make sure that confidential business data is safe. You have IDS (to prevent from external intrusion), you have got firewalls (to protect your network from hackers and prevent insiders from having unauthorized access to malicious websites or IPs), then, there are antivirus solutions on gateways and endpoints. Businesses have also started implementing DLP (Data Loss Prevention) or also called as Endpoint Security to protect their data from theft or loss. DRM (digital rights management) or IRM(Information rights managements) offers security to your data against unauthorized copy or share.
The advantage of better devices was equally shared by the business travelers of a company. A physical business network has its own security infrastructure and the protection of data can be handled easily.
But, think about those laptops and PDAs etc which go out of your office.
What is the real problem with Mobile workforce using laptops and other portable devices to support business?
1. You can not enforce centralized policies because they do not belong to the physical business network once they are out
2. Mobile workforce has to carry some data as they need to support the business
3. High end mobile devices and PDAs are used to send and receive emails and also contains business critical information
Some of the sophisticated VPN solutions are used today in order to force the employees to connect through the company’s gateway, but that doesn’t guarantee that data is secure. There are a number of technical explanations to support this fact (for example a personal can reboot on to a live disc and then copy or transfer the file) but, you can secure it by implementing full disk encryption.
With all kinds of products and solutions, you always have an option of building your own list of products you need. But, we believe that data protection for mobile workforce has to be redesigned and the solution which have been built to support a physical business network can not help fully achieve the solution completely.
Feel free to drop in your comments to make this discussion better!
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