Workers today are roaming all over the place and using a huge number of devices which includes tablets, smart phones, netbooks and laptops.
“We cease to respect the boundaries of a single machine,” according to SAP’s head of product architecture and technology strategy, Sethu Meenakshisundaram.
The days where desktops were static with a data centre residing in the background running all applications, protected by a firewall are behind us.
Data access and control can be tightly controlled when the enterprise owns and controls everything across a single or even multiple machines. In such a situation security, authentication and device management are all relatively straight forward.
However when you have multiple devices running, digging into an organisation’s data centre there is a requirement for new levels of security. It is not feasible to simply transfer the current desktop model to modern infrastructures.
Symantec are underway to try and deliver specific applications and information to all devices with appropriate levels of encryption.
Ken Schneider at Symantec pointed out the other issue which is that “employees have lots of different credentials spread around – and if they leave the company it may take a long time to get these deprovisioned.”
