How to Secure the Virtual Office
Employees are increasingly gobbling up Internet-connected mobile gadgets: they'll buy nearly a half-billion smart phones this year and more than 50 million tablets, the latter a near-tripling since 2010.
As these gadgets flood offices and are used to connect remotely to company email and servers?it can boost efficiency, but also create security challenges that must be overcome in order for the distributed office of the future to succeed.
Companies have long recognized that mere 'perimeter security' around the office network basically stopped working in the last century, killed off by the portable laptop computer. But traditional solutions to managing laptops?including running security software on them and setting up encrypted communications channels known as virtual private networks?fall short. Attackers have learned to create custom malicious programs that remain undetected for days or weeks. And VPNs only protect against eavesdropping, not already-infected devices.
The results can be ugly: witness the Department of Health and Human Service's Wall of Shame, a list of medical-record-related breaches including 32 incidents this year, of which 18 were caused by lost portable devices or laptops. And such security issues are widely expected to worsen.
The problems have forced information-technology teams to switch tactics: rather than try to secure the device, these teams are starting to come up with ways to protect sensitive data even if the devices are compromised.
For example, Heartland Payment Systems, the credit-card processing firm?chastened by the loss of 130 million records during a conventional 2009 server breach?now treats all devices, whether mobile phones or remote point-of-sale terminals, as compromised. So these devices only refer to credit-card data using tokens; that is, special codes that correspond to the actual data, which sits in a protected in a digital vault, says Kris Herrin, chief technology officer.
In general, companies need to classify their data?which kinds require the tightest security, which kinds don't?can quickly be overwhelmed. "You need to really focus your security down to something that you can protect," Herrin says.
Source: http://feeds.technologyreview.com/click.phdo?i=cff11d8aaf577938cae91e06c307d7fc
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