Laptop Special: Security On The Move

In the face of an increasingly well-guarded corporate environment, hackers
have turned their attention to the growing army of mobile workers and their less
secure laptops. For the first time, remote filtering offers a way of extending
corporate security policies out to the mobile workforce.

It is no secret that IT managers view laptop users as a liability. Majority
of IT managers consider that corporate laptops used outside the office and then
re-connected to the network pose a major security risk to their company. Yet
very few have put in place automatic restrictions and policies to secure
Internet use on laptops.

In the corporate environment, it is a different story. Most organizations
have installed a myriad of different security products and services to protect
their network and systems at key access points, such as the Internet, desktop
and server level. Indeed, such is the rate of investment that the corporate
environment has become almost impossible for hackers to crack.

Yet take the laptop out of the office and most companies' security policies
go out the door with it.

The New Hacker

As hackers become more ingenious in the ways they lure users into giving
confidential information or downloading viruses and malware, 'trusting'
remote workers not to misuse a corporate laptop, whether intentionally or
otherwise, is no longer an option, especially in an era when the number of
mobile workers is set to rise significantly.

As in the corporate environment, the most effective way of preventing remote
workers from compromising the corporate IT networks with an infected laptop is
to put in place safeguards that stop them from visiting malicious websites,
giving information away to fraudsters or downloading applications that infect
the IT network and corrupt data files. To be truly effective both inside and
outside the office, an organization's employee Internet management policy
needs to consider mobile security as much as the safety of fixed assets.

Challenge Upgraded

New remote filtering applications can extend the same Web filtering
capabilities used in the corporate LAN to the laptop user. This means that an
organization's employee Internet management policy can be applied to both
office-bound and mobile workers, preventing users, wherever they are based, from
visiting websites deemed to be insecure or an inappropriate use of resources.

Often the problem is that remote workers are simply not aware of what
websites or applications are harmful.

At the same time, an increasing number of employees are abusing their
employer's trust by deliberately using their laptops outside the corporate
environment for non-work related business.

The New Panacea

Remote filtering removes the headache for IT administrators to monitor as to
which sites are secure. It also has financial benefits: given that an
unprotected laptop only has a lifecycle of three days before it grinds to a
halt, anything that can be done to increase its life span is likely to appeal to
IT and finance managers alike.

Once the remote filtering application is installed on a laptop, it ensures
that every time a request is made to visit a website, a second request is sent
back to the corporate system to determine if access is allowed. Other products
on the market have tended to route all network traffic, not just a single
request, through the corporate network. However, this tends to create latency
issues, particularly for organizations already suffering from a lack of
bandwidth in their network.

Everyone understands that laptops poses a problem but until now no suitable
technology solution was available. Remote filtering puts control back into the
hands of the IT manager.

Surendra Singh

maildqindia@cybermedia.co.in

The author is head, South East Asia and India, Websense