Mobile Workforce Security Blog Series – Part 3
Organizations worldwide are seeking greater employee mobility for a variety of business and quality of life reasons. Key to becoming a ‘mobile enterprise’ is the ability to manage and secure the identities and data within an IT ecosystem whose boundaries are becoming increasing blurry. This blog series explores how enterprises can do so to gain enterprise mobile security.
Increased enterprise mobility doesn’t have to mean additional budget.
When it comes to secure remote access and the flexible work styles it allows, many companies still perceive employee mobility to be a luxury. Not only do concerns over upfront investments surface in the mobility discussion, but, anxieties over the need for additional administration and staff emerge, understandably, as well. While numerous solutions can provide increased security, the question remains how much management overhead will be incurred along with that security.
Happily, secure remote access, be it to the corporate network or to cloud applications, can be deployed within your company without shelling out additional budget. When evaluating strong authentication solutions for your VPN access control needs, look for these cost-cutters:
- As-a-service delivery, which reduces TCO by up to 60% according to Gemalto research, and provides flexible subscription-based pricing models.
- Over-the-air provisioning of software-based tokens and tokenless authentication methods. Examples include OTP apps, OOB, and context-based authentication. These two-factor authentication (2FA) methods make it easy to extend strong security to remote staff, and lower ongoing operations & maintenance costs associated with provisioning and replacing lost or damaged tokens.
- Automated workflows, including automated lifecycle administration of user account and tokens synched with existing user stores, and workflows that leverage self-service portals to cut helpdesk costs. Automated system and account-related alerts further reduce overheads, as does multi-tier multi-tenant architecture, which comes in handy to enable implementing existing security policies to new business units.
- Broad ecosystem support, namely out-of-the box integrations which shorten time to deployment and remove the need for additional development efforts, and let you leverage the same solution for all your user access control needs (VPN, VDI, portals, cloud etc.).
- Native identity federation, which eliminates hard and soft costs related to identity federation servers, and shrinks costs associated with lost or forgotten passwords.
- Support of third-party solutions, which lets you keep your current authentication servers and token estate, and allows for incremental migration to a new or refreshed solution.
With two thirds of data breaches resulting from compromised credentials, according to Verizon’s DBIR—including the OPM and Target breaches—IT directors and CIOs can easily protect their organization’s credentials with a step-up second factor. Just as wearing a seatbelt constitutes a must-have rather than a nice-to-have, 2FA is a must-have for IT leaders looking to steer their companies to the mobility freeway.
To learn how simple and easy enterprise mobile security can be, check out our infographic or visit our A4 Authentication for Mobile Workforce Security microsite, and find out how you can secure access to Any Application, from Any Device, at Any Assurance Level, Anywhere.
