Remote Support: How Secure Are You?

Chuck Deaton, Humana:
So moving onto the next slide then, if those are the criteria, then what are some of the qualifications that we really were considering and continue to consider in a comprehensive, remote control type solution? Well, like everyone else, we require the minimum types of hardening or security technologies in terms of encryption, recognized encryption algorithms, key length - those kinds of things - and encrypted tunnel, and all that, that's a minimum; and any technology that does not have that in today's marketplace is not even considered. So we move very quickly, then, to this concept of privacy, whereas - really, the main thing here is you cannot take control of something that you're not participating with another human being or another party on the other end that is agreeing to you having access to the information and the system. So this granting control is completely the opposite of taking control, and we really are focusing in on granting of control as opposed to allowing people to take control at any given time. This has implications of segregation of duties, Sarbanes-Oxley audits, individual accountability, privacy, many regulations is really - are really focused on this particular concept.

It has to be economical and scalable, and I'm going to break that down into two parts. Scalability and the economics of a particular solution can be technical in a sense, even if you're talking about licensing where it's either perceived or concurrency; and it can be economical in licensing in a cost-per-user - again, using the example of concurrency, those two factors come together to see if a solution really is economical at the scale. And if you just look at the scalability factor, really defining that more clearly for everyone to kind of understand our perspective, scalability's really defined in two terms. One is to maximize the users or sessions with a minimal amount of hardware; and then at the same time, maximize the speed and performance with the maximum users or sessions. So as your load goes up, your hardware should stay down and your cost should go down. And that's sort of a unique way of looking at it as opposed to maybe in a traditional technology sense, people look at things like if it scales, it just means it'll handle a bunch of people. You may have to build 20 data centers to put all your hardware in, but hey, you still get a bunch of people on the system. And that is counterproductive to the "security is inversely proportional to complexity" model. You can't keep three data centers worth of stuff secure when you can do it with two boxes and be much more secure and much more economical over the long run.