Intelligent CISO Issue 25 | Page 64

provide the infrastructure to a distributed workforce, with each ‘worker’ having individual set-ups away from their office. More importantly it means providing access to business applications from outside of the company network. Today’s company network is protected at great expense with a variety of technologies and strategies from sandbox to subnet, firewalls and proxies, malware and DLP, to name a few, as well as personnel education. Key and critical applications were provided to specific workers on company machines through a company network – think of HR and the HRMS system, or finance and ERP. And even with these measures in place, breaches occur and for well-known organisations are highly publicised and very costly. Now imagine the increase in vulnerability and subsequent risk when access to the same critical applications is needed across hundreds of personal devices from outside of a protected network – and imagine the hair pulling of ITOps and SecOps teams throughout the land as they struggle with this. So, access is key to enable WFH for the protection of the employee, but secured access is critical to the protection of the business. And all talk naturally focuses on Secured Unified Endpoint Management (SUEM), whether this is done via several different technologies or you are fortunate to utilise a single platform that delivers this capability. Can you outline some of the key benefits of remote working? I am sure we have all experienced the good, the bad and the ugly of remote working. The most common feedback I have heard, from many of my colleagues and friends, is that they are simply more productive – with conference call after conference call possible and all systems at their fingertips. From a cost efficiency perspective, there are many instances of companies re-assigning budgets; travel factored cost of sales reducing; customer engagement, including training, now being led remotely; real estate and floorspace needs being re-examined; events expenditure being shelved in favour of other marketing activities. This may also include cases where companies are estimating the average weekly coffee and kitchen spend and funnelling that to other areas of the business. Collaboration between functions and locations has improved – no longer siloed by a physical desk behind a physical door within a physical team, many people from various departments are ‘meeting’ for the first time. 64 Issue 25 | www.intelligentciso.com