Tale of two halves must end

IT bosses and remote workers need to work together to solve divide over security issues

Nigel Hawthorn: IT managers might assume that remote workers are abusing company systems, but they are not.

A recent survey carried out by business generation company Emedia has found 50 per cent of network managers and 48 per cent of security managers believe that remote workers are most likely to introduce malware into the corporate network.

With IT bosses increasingly concerned over the security risk posed by remote workers, a conflict of interest is now arising.
As organisations turn to hosted application services and outsourced datacentres and their employees demand access to various systems from a number of different devices and locations; remote and branch office users argue that there is a need for organisations to carefully consider their requirement when deploying applications remotely or over the internet, and that IT departments should be planning for all eventualities.

This has led to the development of a divide between IT managers and remote workers, which is growing rapidly.
It is clear that IT managers need to rethink how they service their remote and branch office workers to ensure employees are as effective as possible wherever they happen to be situated.

The issue of security and performance at a remote office location is not primarily due to the employees downloading inappropriate content on non-work related activities.

Differing demands
On the contrary, it is a mixture of the distance covered by employees in terms of round-trip time, bandwidth demands of the remote office system, and the use of different systems than the organisation’s head office.

This means companies need to carefully consider all the IT requirements of remote and branch workers when deploying applications.

IT managers might assume that remote workers are abusing company systems, but research carried out by Blue Coat shows they are not. Perhaps this is because they are more acutely aware of what happens when more bandwidth is needed remotely than for the office-based staff.

Employers have to look at the people they employ and provide them with the service and technical capabilities they need to do their jobs efficiently and correctly.

In previous years, connectivity, then security and availability were seen as the major issues around remote working. These have since been solved with the prevalence of broadband, Wi-Fi, 3G services and secure network connections.

Access all areas
As more employees expect to be able to access a wide range of services regardless of where they are based, performance is the next major hurdle for network managers to overcome.

This trend only highlights the growing need for both network and security managers to work together closely to ensure that employees have the best access possible to an efficient IT system. This should be the case no matter where they are, nor should it mean compromising security.