Securing the Mobile Workforce

The rising tide of mobile computing, driven by the introduction of consumer devices such as the iPhone and iPad, is crashing against the shores of many an IT shop. Most IT organizations have lived on a diet of corporate policy restrictions and liberal use of the word “No!”, unfortunately their time has come.

SC Magazine: Securing the Mobile Endpoint

Quotes from a recent SC Magazine article “Increased Mobile Working Has Caused a Rethink on Endpoint Security” (here) focuses on encryption, cloud-computing and desktop virtualization…

How Cloud, Virtualization, and Mobile Computing Impact Endpoint Management in the Enterprise

I had an interesting conversation with a peer recently that started with a statement he made that “innovation was all but dead in security”. The implication was that we had done all we could do and that there was very little more that would be accomplished. Of course I felt this was an overly simplistic and narrow view, not to mention that it completely ignores the rather dramatic impact changes in computing infrastructures will have over the next 5-10 years and beyond.

How have enterprise architectures evolved over the past 10 years and how will it continue to evolve? Simply put we are pushing more of our computing assets and the infrastructure that supports them out into the Internet / cloud. It began with mobile computing devices, remote offices, and telecommuters and is now moving into aspects of the traditional internal infrastructure, such as storage, application / service delivery, and data management. This has forced IT to, in some cases, radically redefine the technologies and processes they implement to even provide the basics of availability, maintenance and security. How does an IT organization maintain the health and availability of the evolving enterprise while securing the environment? How do they ensure visibility into and control over an increasingly complex and opaque infrastructure?