In the past year and a half, securely facilitating remote working has become a priority for a majority of enterprises. It’s also become clear that remote working is going to be a longer-term or permanent working model enterprises will need to support.
These days, more enterprises than ever are undergoing digital transformations to modernize their operations and keep up with the competition. Technologies like cloud computing, mobile tools and various IoT (Internet of Things) solutions are being adopted to power these transformations.
An article in the New York Times dated March 18, 2020 says it best, “Tech can make remote work miserable.” As companies across the country send their employees home to work remotely in an effort to keep them safe and abide by government orders, millions of employees new to the idea of working from home are realizing the tech headaches involved in it. An astonishing 50+ percent of the U.S. is now working from home according to the latest estimates. That’s roughly 85 million people. While the involved numbers should be a surprise, the fact that many of these users have poor or inadequate wireless at home to utilize for work shouldn’t be.
To reliably ensure continued network security, IT professionals know the importance of complete visibility, and governance of all connected devices. A single vulnerability or just one device with unrestricted access can be enough for a hacker to find their way into your network.
As the demand for mobility at work increases, laptops, smartphones, tablets and Internet of Things (IoT) devices are pouring into the workplace. On average, employees utilize three different devices at a time – and all of them increase vulnerabilities inside your enterprise.
SD-WAN (Software-Defined Wide Area Network) is about recognizing the importance of the entire forest that is your network. It is about ensuring that all of your sites enjoy the same level of performance, automation, load optimization, and security that your central operations office does. This is the pretext for SD-WAN. SD-WAN is about applying software defined technology to your WAN connections regardless of distance and complexity. The goal is to optimize the experience of all of your users, regardless of enterprise location. This blog outlines four of the leading SD-WAN solutions in the market today.
Securing the enterprise is an evolving challenge today. In order to effectively manage today’s enterprise, you must be able to draw a complete picture of everything connected to your network. Enterprises are implementing a Network Access Control solution (NAC) to identify, assess, and enforce access control on any and all devices before they connect to the network. A NAC solution provides the basic necessity of knowing what devices IT is tasked with securing. A NAC solution can identify and profile each subsequent device wanting to connect, as well as:
Recently I was talking to the network manager of a school district in Georgia. The district had just experienced a large scale malware attack. It started in the transportation department, which had refused to let go of some outdated machines that were susceptible to the EternalBlue windows vulnerability, made famous by the WannaCry and NotPetya malware encryption attacks last summer.
Today’s workers are experiencing more freedom thanks to the explosive adoption of mobile devices in the enterprise. However, with an increasing amount of devices connecting to the network, IT administrators now have an overwhelming amount of information to monitor, and most of the time there are gaps in visibility to all of the devices trying to connect to the network. Aruba Clearpass offers your IT department a way to protect your data while allowing authorized users the ability to access information on the go or in the office.
