Remote Support: How Secure Are You?

Chuck Deaton, Humana:
And so Humana's control object - remote control objectives, and moving forward was to consider this vast number of user populations or user communities that include both our employees and our business partners, and also our vendors and how they factor into that. Some of the key factors here is mobility; it's an ever-increasing mobile workforce out there for everyone, as Bill mentioned, and the flexibility and mobility presents huge challenges.

We also need to consider all the different technologies that people use and that we have no longer any control over that. Interoperability, compatibility issues abound. People use anything they can get their hands on that has basically in these days an SSL or a web-base type utility, and they expect fully to be able to get into the things that they need to, have access to, to perform service or to even do their jobs. And to be able to leverage all this broadband connectivity that continues to be adopted by the masses, up to and including very inexpensive and somewhat unreliable connections - unstable connections - all the way down to and including the old legacy dial-up connections. These technologies have to be able to work, at least to some functional level and performance level, even on those slow connections.

And we have the challenge and information security, which not everyone really considers as factor that much in my experience, of the differences between remote control and remote access. And as Bill said, to have remote control, you must first have access; and therefore, it puts the security people square between you and your objective. Really, the focus is protecting the data. I mean, this conversation today is not about an attacker, or a hacker, or malicious software; it's about authorized people doing authorized tasks in remote locations from various places and using various technology. So it's really not about the hacker; it's about the information that authorized users are touching. And so in that regard, if we can have more visibility inside a remote control stream or remote control session and security we think, if we can have more visibility of what's going on with our systems and with the users and with the data, then we can release or relive some of the security restraints that are around that because accountability or visibility of that activity allows us to balance the restrictive nature and the non-productive nature of hardening or locking things down.