Two Waves of Support: Balancing Security & Mobility

Nathan McNeill, VP of Product Management:
Remember a few years back you had the whole Worldcom/Enron/Aurther Anderson fiascos? You know, big corporate scandals. Well, on the heels of that, you have a bunch of new corporate - or new federal regulations that came up like HIPAA, like Sarbanes-Oxley, like Gramm-Leach-Bliley, and a whole host of other regulations that basically are locking down or redefining what it means to be secure as a corporation. So, it's not just the bits and bytes anymore. It's also the information security. What this means is basically that security is two-fold. It does include IT security which talks through - which is dealing with more of the technology, technological security, you know, think encrypted tunnels, strong password protection, secure interfaces. And, this also includes SPAM filterings, firewalls, all the stuff to keep the bad guys out on a technical level. So, that's kind of, you know, the old school - we've been doing that for years.

What these new regulations introduce is also the aspect of information security which is more dealing with the people and the accountability for what those people do using the technology even if they're authorized users. So, it has to do with auditing of authorized user activity. Again, even if someone has access to a system, from a Sarbanes-Oxley or HIPAA perspective you have to know how they're accessing it, what they're doing when they access it for accountability purposes.

End point security, securing even unmanaged nodes - consider this. Like, if you have - if you as a company are supporting one of your web applications, you can access that application from whichever PC. I mean, even if they're using, you know, their son's PC at home they can still access that web application. So, you're responsible to ensure security also for that unmanaged PC that you don't own. And, it all comes down to kind of information accountability. You're accountable for the flow of information - for the who, what, when, where, and why of where your information and data goes.