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Enterprises are increasingly opening up their networks to a greater constituency of remote users, but they often do not take into consideration the protection of user identity as a critical component of their strategy. The mobile workforce can now work productively from a remote location such as a home office, the airport, a hotel, or a customer site. Organizations must now implement a secure user authentication system, which includes two-factor authentication, as a means to secure these remote connections to sensitive network resources and applications. Moreover, the ubiquitous nature of mobile phones has now given rise to a new, convenient form factor for two-factor authentication—the software-based authenticator that resides right on the mobile device that everyone carries with them.
Working Remotely, Then and Now
It was not so long ago that working remotely and being productive were phrases not often used in the same sentence. Working from home was a luxury for the few, and it was often beset by slow access speeds and limited access to critical business applications. Physical presence in the office was inherently necessary to get any meaningful work done. For employees that traveled or were based in the field, work piled up as they spent long hours in airport lounges, hotels, taxis, and at customer locations.
With the broad adoption of remote access technologies, this scenario has changed. Today, workers outside the office have same level of access to applications, data and computing infrastructure as inside. Thanks to improvements in access technologies, corporations have thrown open the gates to their networks to empower their employees.
The economics of working from home or while on the move are attractive to both the employee and the corporation. To the employee it means a flexible work schedule and the ability to stabilize an otherwise inconsistent work schedule in a global business environment where an individual’s responsibilities may span several time zones and countries. To the employer it means more productive employees and higher morale. Companies in a wide range of industries are seeing a growing number of employees who conduct business remotely. Remote access software and hardware markets have experienced tremendous growth as organizations extend the availability of critical applications and data.
Remote workers in a growing number of roles need access to email, files and critical business applications in order to perform day to day activities. Similarly, partners and even customers often need to have access to certain applications and data residing on an enterprise network. The growing number of users that need access to the network is matched only by the growing amounts of data that is available in the corporate datacenters.
User Identity Gets Lost in Translation
Enterprises have clearly created mechanisms and adopted technologies that open up enterprise networks and business applications to the outside world. The level of access control to these networks that was considered adequate within the confines of the office buildings is no longer acceptable. The prospect of a hacker gaining access to enterprise systems claiming to be an employee is enough to make even the most experienced IT administrators queasy.
Moreover, the concepts of managing user identity, in most cases the primary element to controlling the “keys to the kingdom,” have been relatively overlooked, much to the detriment of unsuspecting organizations. Most companies have implemented strong security measures to protect physical access to their facilities. And access to the network from inside the perimeter is often seen as a priority. Nonetheless, it is remote access security that often gets overlooked. User authentication with passwords has served as a means of establishing user identities since the beginning. The system worked fine when the community accessing information did so when inside the secured physical boundary of the organization.
Over the years, increasingly sensitive data on networks has been exposed to more users, attracting more hackers to break into enterprise network environments. Access by a large user community leaves enterprises even more vulnerable to hackers since security of the system is now dependent on the strength of the weakest password in a large group of passwords.
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