Intelligent CIO Middle East Issue 45 | Page 51

////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////// FEATURE: BYOD Securing a remote workforce The modern workforce is more flexible and collaborative than ever before, with technology enabling employees to work from anywhere, at any time, on any device. But these new remote workforces are not without their security risks. We spoke to two industry experts about some of the biggest cyberthreats and how companies can best address these. www.intelligentcio.com W What are the main cybersecurity challenges that remote workforces need to overcome and how can CIOs address these? NICOLAI SOLLING, CTO, HELP AG Securing the remote workforce has always been a challenge and there are a number of reasons for that. First of all, historically there has been more focus on protecting the organisation instead of the remote user. As an example, organisations have deployed more and more sophisticated network security components such as next-gen firewalls and anti-malware solutions, which typically inspect network traffic within the organisation. However, users take their laptops home, they are vulnerable as they are outside of this protection. From a technical standpoint, we have been able to address this for a number of years by backhauling remote users’ traffic to the headquarters via VPN but organisations today are still worried about user experience and bandwidth consumption. INTELLIGENTCIO 51