Remote Support: How Secure Are You?

Chuck Deaton, Humana:
Thanks, Bill. You said a mouthful here, and it's very good information, and I'm on board with it. I think Humana is seeing exactly the same kind of trends that you bring to the table. I guess going forward right now, we should be looking at the agenda slide, and we'll look at some of the solutions that we've - or solution goals that we tried to consider in this particular challenge of remote control or remote access, and then kind of move on into criteria qualifications and then summarize it with the key points. So having said that, we'll go to the next slide.

As you can imagine, Humana's really not that much more unique than many of the customers that you will encounter in that we have already just a litany of remote control tools. So it's not a lack of remote control necessarily, especially in our own boundaries that we are faced with. It really is this issue of accountability and security of information assets, the electronic information in particular. With those kind of challenges, we find ourselves over the past few years of not being able to answer the basic questions of who is accessing what information and what exactly they're doing with it.

And that extends right on into the remote control arena as well, and not only for inside but also crossing the boundary. As Bill mentioned, people are everywhere, and your partners, your vendors, your employees; and you've got to be able to reach out and touch those systems, and they have to reach back in and touch systems on the inside. So this concept of answering the basic questions of visibility of information access and information accountability is an important concept. And ultimately, it comes right down to what I'm going to call the "Information Security Golden Rule." Essentially, with the regulatory issues that we face, they go on the information, make all the access and remote control rules. And that's something that you can't really overlook that much.