Remote Support: How Secure Are You?

Chuck Deaton, Humana:
And then finally, if we look at all the different tools that we currently have to manage - a variety of things, everybody uses their favorite remote control tool - we want to consolidate and minimize as many of those as possible. Especially from like a Humana's perspective, we own the data, so we call the shots. So it's much more productive for us to be able to build a remote control infrastructure and offer it up to anyone who comes to the door, rather than accepting everyone's favorite remote control solution and having Humana try and adopt to that for thousands of vendors and customers and so on and so forth.

All of this has to be constrained for us through this tremendous regulatory explosion that's occurred, and there are some of those mentioned here, with Sarbanes and HIPAA, GLBA, PCI, Senate Bill 1386, which is kind of sweeping the country right now, the Center for Medicare Services, Department of Defense, Department of Insurance - the list goes on and on and on. And it's different for each vertical and each company.

So looking at Humana's criteria, if we move onto the next slide, how do we view security then, if security is central to this getting access to a company's assets, both physical and electronic? And how do we size up security? And we look at it in somewhat of a unique fashion, I think. We look at the economics, we look at the speed, the simplicity, we look at the mobility. And those factors come together to form this sort of equation that I'm going to call, "complexity is inversely proportional to security." In other words, it's not just the parts that make it up, but it's the sum of the parts. And at Humana, we've learned with many technologies, from a mainframe to a client server world, from the AppDev, on and on and on that you can have the most hardened system in the world, but if it has too many moving parts and pieces, it won't take very long for it to become unsecure or unreliable. And so therefore, we try to keep things - and remote control's one of those - we try to keep those solution sets as simple as possible in terms of the moving pieces and parts, also in terms of the number of people and companies that are involved, so that we can maximize our security potential, not only initially, but also throughout - ongoing throughout the use of the technology by various user communities. So the - this whole idea of the ratio of complexity and security is really how we size up our ability to secure information assets or systems in general.