Secure application delivery for a mobile workforce

By: Parag Arora, Area Vice President and Country Head, India Subcontinent, Citrix India Subcontinent

“The more things change, the more they stay the same.” This popular French proverb might sound cliché but it succinctly explains many situations that businesses are facing with mobility and security.

Although billons of dollars are spent on security solutions, information remains vulnerable as new threat and attack vectors are emerging everyday and the volume of incidents is on the rise. The rise of mobile and distributed workforces, BYO, global operations, and third party consultants, outsourcing vendors, and partnerships has only increased these concerns.

Mobility has given people the unparalleled flexibility to work from anywhere, at any time—but we should also realize the endless complications it has brought to IT. Consider that devices are now both corporate and personally owned, many users select cloud-based applications, employees no longer do all their work within a corporate facility and traditional office hours are a thing of the past. Together the multiplication of devices, apps and locations has increased the security burden, and a new approach must be sought.
Organizations are torn, they must be able to support yet separate personal apps, business apps and data on both managed and unmanaged devices (taking into account BYO as well as company-issued devices) without sacrificing security or introducing increased risk.

So how do organization protect sensitive information and enable compliance of apps and data without compromising workforce flexibility and productivity?

How do we ensure the security of the device itself? Has it been jail broken/hacked? What password protections have been applied? Can local enterprise data be protected effectively? – These are the questions organizations and their IT departments are grappling with.

The pillars that the solution addresses should include:
Focus on balancing security needs with user experience demands. Rather than manage only the device, successful organizations take a holistic view of security where the focus is on balancing the user experience and productivity with security across devices, apps, data, networks and identity.
Protect sensitive information from loss and theft while at rest, in use, and in motion on devices, servers or the cloud by controlling the appropriate level of contextual access
Facilitate compliance and regulatory enforcement with centralized IT control of data and monitoring, reporting and auditing across application, data, network and user behavior
Allow people to work securely with full productivity beyond the constraints of physical desks, traditional work hours by providing secure access to apps and data no matter where it resides
Ensure the availability and performance of traffic over any network connection and device for an optimized user experience
and disasters by ensuring workforce continuity and ongoing business operations
Reduce the attack surface while lowering IT costs. With an overall goal of reducing the attack surface, organizations can lower operational costs and reduce spend on individual security technologies, particularly for devices, by focusing on app and data security and usage. Organizations should deliver secure apps with encryption for data in use, data at rest, and data in motion
Enable flexible options for data storage, access and management. With the convenience and cost benefit of a globally dispersed workforce, storing business information anywhere— from mobile storage to cloud apps—requires increased IT control on where information should reside and with whom it can be shared. Many organizations are looking for a flexible mix of centralized control across data centre servers, cloud storage and endpoint containerization.

It is pivotal for enterprise’s to consider a solution designed to help people become as productive as possible, while empowering them with freedom and flexibility to choose how they work without compromising on security. Follow these pillars to ensure your enterprise security and data protection changes along with your business needs, and your business remains protected from emerging threats.