By Charles F. Moreira
The explosion of personal hand held devices such as smartphones and tablets and the bring your own device (BYOD) trend where they are used for work, coupled with employees’ use of publicly available applets on their devices and publicly available cloud services, have come up against different responses by organisations due to security concerns.
On the one hand, some have tried to prevent employee access to applications and services such as Google Calendar, Dropbox, Facebook, WhatsApp and others, whilst others have tried to provide in-house equivalents.
However, Web surveillance, content filtering, security and wide-area network (WAN) bandwidth optimisation company Blue Coat Systems believes in allowing employees to make use of the best technologies and services out there which best let them perform their job, with the best of protection.
“Employees today can easily decide amongst themselves to collaborate using such publicly available sites and application on an ad-hoc basis, bypassing their organisation’s information system, and these public services often work better than what their organisation can provide,” Hugh Thompson, Blue Coat, Chief Security Strategist and Senior Vice-President told Enterprise IT News on the sidelines of the RSA Conference Asia Pacific 2013 in Singapore. “Instead of preventing employees from using applications and services, we can instead secure their use of it against risks,” he added.
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| Hugh Thompson |
Increased productivity, more revenue
Blue Coat also unveiled findings of a global survey which show that when employees can safely and quickly choose the best available applications and services for their work, their efficiency increases and their company benefits financially,
The survey of over 1,900 business and IT leaders was written by the Economist Intelligence Unit and conducted by Vanson Bourne. In response, 84% of executives agreed that so empowering employees increased business efficiency, whilst those in the world’s fastest growing companies said empowering employees with choice technology can increase business revenue by over 35%.
Worldwide 68% of the fastest growing companies increased their profitability by by using such technologies compared to only 39% of the slow-growing companies. Likewise, 66% of the world’s fastest growing companies have used technology to empower their users, compared to 48% of slow growing companies.
Whilst businesses are trying to harness technology to provide new products and services, improve customer experience and increase their competitive advantage, traditional security methods are too rigid and outdated to match the pace of innovation adoption. According to the survey, 52% of business leaders believe that such IT policies slow innovation, whilst 53% believe they slow customer service. Globally, 76% of IT leaders believe that security is the biggest obstacle to enabling employees to choose the best technology (applications and services) at will.
The survey covered a wide range of industries including financial services, IT, telecommunication service providers, manufacturers and others. According to Thomson, technology companies were found to be early adopters, whilst companies with information workers benefited the most from such technology adoption. On the other hand manufacturing and financial services companies tended to be more resistant to the use of personal devices, though the marketing departments of financial services companies made much use of them.
Business Assurance
At the same time, Blue Coat introduced its Business Assurance Technology blueprint, a new approach to security which lets businesses provide employees, customers, partners and suppliers the freedom to choose the best applications, devices, data sources and technologies whilst ensuring business continuity, agility and governance.
Business Assurance Technology is provided through five technology centre products and services which let use the technologies they want to safely and securely.
The Security and Policy Enforcement Centre provides business continuity by protecting against threats and data loss, while it lets enterprises provide a safe and productive Internet and network experience for users.
The Mobility Empowerment Centre extends protection and policy to users anywhere on any device. It lets organisations can successfully drive mobile business initiatives. For example, airlines can reduce costs by replacing emergency flight manuals with iPads for all pilots.
The Trusted Application Centre lets organisations safely deploy and use all types of applications. It lets businesses build closer relationships with customers through the innovative use of applications. For example, insurance companies can accept photos of damage to speed claims processing.
The Performance Centre aligns IT infrastructure with business priorities to assure network performance and optimise user experience across the extended enterprise. It lets organisations align performance strategies with key business strategies. For example, retail stores can provide a more tailored customer experience.
The Resolution Centre provides businesses with advanced threat protection by combining deep security intelligence and analytics with a large network effect from 75 million users worldwide. It lets enterprises adjust security policies based on in-depth security analytics and quickly recover from a data breach.
The new products in Blue Coat’s Trusted Application and Resolution Centres extends its ability to draw upon a global network of millions of users at over 15,000 organisations to provide threat and application intelligence.
With over 1.2 million available iOS and Android applets which let users revolutionise their productivity, these applications have changed the nature of Web content, the understanding and categorisation of which to effectively enforce policies and assure compliance requires a new approach, and to help enterprises, Blue Coat is introducing its new Application Classification Service and Application Controller as part of its Trusted Application Centre.
Together, they let enterprises dynamically classify applications, understand application behaviour and identify and control application traffic in real time.
Given today’s increasingly complex and sophisticated threat environment, businesses increasingly assume they will, at some point, be breached, and this is driving an expansion of traditional prevention technologies to include remediation technologies that can quickly identify breaches and root causes and update security processes to prevent similar breaches in the future.
To help enterprises protect against advanced targeted attacks, Blue Coat is introducing its new SSL Visibility appliance based upon technologies recently acquired from Netronome Systems.
Blue Coat also announced that it had agreed to acquire Solera Networks, which develops technology that acts like a camera on the network. Both technologies are critical components of the Resolution Centre, which combines analytic and forensic capabilities with the network effect of 75 million users to provide a modern malware defence that protects the business before, during and after an event. The Resolution Centre gives customers comprehensive visibility into the content and context of advanced targeted attacks.
This visibility lets enterprises protect against advanced threats by combining traditional malware blocking with analytics and a large network effect that can prevent attacks in real time, lets them identify and resolve the root cause of targeted attacks for remediation and prevention of future attacks, and to improve governance through real-time feedback into security processes and policies.
The SSL Visibility appliance will be available this summer, the Application Classification Service will be available later this year, whilst the acquisition of Solera Networks is expected to be compled in early July this year.
