SMART WORKING: HOW THE PANDEMIC IS CHANGING IT PERSPECTIVE ON USERS, APPS AND SECURITY
The new Covid-19 pandemic has forced all of us to change the way we work, live and socialize with other people.Enterprises today face a massive disruption in the way they deliver IT services. Many companies had to adapt quickly to the emergency situation and adopt smart working allowing their employees to work from home.
Smart working, remote working, teleworking – there is a big usage now of these terms and a big confusion among them as well – but they all have one thing in common: the user is not on the perimeter of the organization.
The challenge is that the IT and the workforce structures in enterprises can no longer rely on existing perimeter-based application and data access architectures and solutions.
Providing application-specific access in full security to enterprise systems and data has become more important than ever.
Some organizations have already been adopting agile work forms for years, while others had to adjust the methodology very quickly to assure the business continuity during the emergency and the IT team has become the absolute protagonist of this process.
The main challenge businesses are facing now is how to assure secure access in the right moment to the right application for the right user. And yes, it can be very hard if you consider all the factors: number of enterprise applications, variety of users, and devices.
Think about all the Applications a company has: on-premises, SaaS, in a public cloud, hosted in a datacenter and distributed with remote protocols, old legacy applications – all of them need to be accessible by the users in a secure way.
The next component is the Users: the notion of the user has changed a lot, it is no longer an employee, but it is also a supplier, partner, customer, developer. Different users need to have access to different applications and the IT Departement must be able to control, being able to have granular visibility and also to monitor the access.
The device: during the normal times BYOD is vastly used, while now for many organizations it has transformed into more of a Use-Your-Own-Device from home, and what we see is a huge variety of mobile, laptop and desktop computers, all possible types and versions of the OS, app incompatibility, antivirus issues, network and Internet connection security concerns.
To distribute enterprise applications to the remote users traditionally the companies use VPNs, Remote access solutions (RDPs), and proxies. But the new types of organization processes, the new ways to work and the new kinds of applications – all contribute to increasing of security risks.
The perimeter-based application architectures are no longer compatible with the changing environment and with the new business models.
A new approach must be taken under examination and it means providing secure, application-specific access to enterprise systems and data. While the traditional approach with VPNs and RDPs may make a company vulnerable to attack and threats by bad actors who move laterally inside the network.
The need is to implement a solution that allows users to access specific applications and not to entire networks or network segments, as VPN does.
The ideal solution is a cloud-delivered, identity-aware, high-performance service to provide secure application access for users whenever and wherever they need it.
Discover how Criticalcase together with Akamai provides a fast, secure and high-performance solutions to manage application access and download the product brief.
Contact us
Fill out the form and one of our experts will contact you within 24 hours: we look forward to meeting you!
