Remote Support: How Secure Are You?

Chuck Deaton, Humana:
So some of the other factors here on the next slide in the solution qualifications is just this concept of simplicity. The customization is high for us; I mean, we have different users who need different things. Some users need to transfer files, some don't. We don't want a system locked down where you can't transfer any files when you really need to. Accountability is used, so if we've got the visibility, we can do with you whatever we wish. And again, we're controlling the shots there. Very important concept. It's gotta be transparent to firewalls, and then from there it really gets into - I do want to mention the efficiency of the footprint, because in today's world, one of the huge qualifications that we had is we do not want to distribute software or leave big software footprints on people's machines that we do not own or operate. So it's - this idea of having some central location that sort of gives you the client on demand and then relieves you of the client whenever the connection is broken is a very powerful concept; and economically and operationally, provides huge benefit to us and provides a great deal of comfort for the end users in saying, "When we're gone, your system is as it was when we got there."

And then from there, features kind of take different directions for different companies. My bottom line here for you with these qualifications, which are rather lengthy, is that we just didn't pick one. We looked at many solutions, we had experience with many solutions, and we had some fairly stringent criteria that had to be met.

Moving to the next slide, so then security is sort of a generic term, so what does it mean to us as we look at this important factor of security being between you and the end customer that you support? Well, there's two facets: One is technical and one is informational. The old model of IT security is hardening and OS encrypting and encrypting tunnels and so on and so forth; I mean everybody's sort of familiar with the attacker type hardening approaches. The information security component is more ability visibility and accountability of data assets. Who's accessing the data, what kind of data is it, what does the data file contain - i.e., Social Security numbers, credit cards embedded in a spreadsheet or something to that effect, where is the spreadsheet going, is it encrypted when it leaves the boundary, is it being used by insiders, is it being used by outsiders?