You don’t need more boxes

The growth of flexible working is leading inexorably to the 'office anywhere' model. There will be no constraints on how, when or where we choose to work. Already, mobile workers take their laptops out into the utopian world of customer contact via the luxury of a coffee shop sofa. But very few do it securely.

Administrators now realise that deep cultural change is needed to counter this next challenge. The traditional perimeter defence of corporate networks is no more. It now extends through any number of hotels, airports and cafés.

Many firms attempt deperimeterisation by throwing more technology, boxes and secure connections at the problem, in the vain hope of creating an ever-expanding safe environment. But this usually brings only more cost and complexity with, ultimately, little improvement.

Many of the challenges in provisioning and supporting remote workers can be fixed by articulating, enforcing and reviewing corporate mobile usage policies. The big question is how? There is an unconventional answer.

Every mobile worker uses the internet to function. This offers the perfect mechanism to deliver and enforce endpoint security policies. It provides a ready-made deployment, administration and reporting platform that can be controlled centrally, but managed remotely.

Organisations do not need to buy more technology, they can use existing architecture. Endpoint security clients can manage user activity and protect at the same time.

There is a delicious irony that, when many analysts believe that 'in the cloud'-type services will become the de-facto method to secure endpoints, organisations may have their security policies delivered and enforced by the one thing they have spent the best part of 20 years protecting themselves against – the internet.