Treat Everyone as a Remote Worker
So, it’s now 2017, we’ve reliable mobile communications with 4g, we’ve started to nail getting things into the Cloud and we’ve got good connectivity everywhere. We’ve even got powerful Laptops and Mobile devices.
What’s the benefit I hear you say? Absolutely none if you continue to deploy services in the same way they were deployed in the past.
Moving towards the future, rather than making it imperative that services work securely just from the office, or a select number of locations, make them work from anywhere, but secure them correctly and make them as accessible as possible.
What’s the benefit? What’s the purpose? Having all those users out in the wild on mobile devices having immediate access to data means quicker service for your customers, it means faster time to market, it means doing what you do best at a faster pace.
It can also increase the security of your organisation. For too long, companies have deemed the LAN to be a safe and none hostile environment. I’ve found quite the opposite, even with device enrolment through services like 802.1x (which most companies don’t use!) LANs are treated as all access areas. It’s all too easy for a threat actor to place a raspberry-PI with an AutoSSH tunnel onto your network and siphon data, meanwhile you’re potentially unaware for weeks.
In the model of everything hosted and accessible on the internet, there is no longer a “LAN” in a traditional sense, it’s just a conduit that enables people to get access, as they would from any other wireless/mobile communication network. Side effects include easier Disaster Recovery/Business Continuity Planning. It’s a Snow Day? People just work as normal.
The other issue is we often think of workers as doing exactly what we do. Often other people within our company need access to information on the go, that might be field engineers, warehouse teams, construction workers or more. Moving to these solutions helps others as well, it’s always worth considering what impact different users within your company would see from a change.
Solutions like this are easier to move to than ever. If you need help moving, just shout, we’d be happy to talk things through with you, even if it’s just a brief chat to talk through your situation!
