Snowstorms and Baseball Games: It's All about Remote Productivity and Data Governance

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Recent storms in the northeastern United States serve as a reminder and sometimes cautionary tale: If you’ve waited until the eve of “the storm” to plan and enact a business continuity strategy, you’ve likely waited a day too long. And it’s not just snowstorms; hurricanes and other natural disasters and events, can slow or shut down corporate offices and force employees to work remotely. As anyone in New England will tell you, just like a storm, a midday baseball game between MLB nemeses can empty out an entire office, placing a major burden on the systems that manage remote connectivity; including virtual private networking, secure socket servers and the multiple layers of identity management and authentication.

While today’s technology enables mobile workers to remain productive anytime and anywhere, it’s essential that organizations also provide employees with the tools and policies needed to be secure and compliant in their remote information exchanges.

When employees work remotely and use prosumer devices and services like personal computers, smartphones and the cloud, the governance of the information moving in and out of the corporate environment becomes more of a priority. Technology that provides governance capabilities, such as managed file transfer and integration suites, can help companies address their governance needs and mitigate the risk of data breaches, access and authentication breaches and damage to the corporate brand.

Along with technology, a robust set of policies that ensure the control, security, management, monitoring, provisioning and validation of data and its usage will result in better business continuity, and will minimize the after effects of a “massive remote working incident”.

Factors IT should consider include:

1.     Increased demand for access control and authentication systems. An on-premise employee may be able to keep network credentials alive for a longer period of time than a remote employee, forcing repeated access and authentication attempts.

2.     The increased usage of personal devices on the corporate network. Even if the company provisions a corporate PC or laptop, access to corporate resources may ultimately end up coming via an unsecured smartphone or tablet.

3.     Disregard for IT policies. In some cases, employees that work remotely or use personal devices become lax with respect to corporate governance and IT policies. In an office setting, an employee may always “log off” or lock a machine, but how often does that happen at home or in a hotel room? While all data breaches are not malicious - if an employee accidentally mishandles sensitive information - it remains a data breach nonetheless.

4.     Increased demand for system performance and availability. Networks are becoming increasingly more complex and distributed. Start with encrypted data streams, the encryption and decryption of the payload, and “mix in” multiple hops via the Internet through subnets with a lowered quality of service (QoS) and voila!  IT better start tuning their applications and systems to get the same level of performance they would have had if the employee were working on premise.

5.     Increased demand for help desk and service desk personnel and applications. Password reset services can quickly become inundated when many remote workers come in to play.

Every event - including the multiple blizzards of 2011 - should be a learning experience for IT. As soon as possible, representatives from IT should interview remote employees, surveying them on expectations, both explicit and implicit service levels, and the availability and quality of IT resources. And it isn’t just a learning opportunity for the IT department. It’s a learning opportunity for the remote employee, who in the absence of technologies, processes, and services, will look for and obtain their own mechanisms to be productive and retain access to corporate resources.

The bottom line? Regardless of where or how an employee works, the onus is on the organization to ensure that employees have the tools and assistance needed to remain productive and secure in their data interactions. In return, employees must keep data security, compliance and management top of mind.

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Frank Kenney is a former Gartner analyst and current VP of Global Strategy at Ipswitch File Transfer. Ipswitch, the managed file transfer company, builds software that helps companies and people securely move sensitive data.