Growth in home working puts pressure on network security.

04.11.2008

39% of public sector managers polled recently said that flexible working was encouraged in their organisations reports Matt Ashman of Khipu Networks. Government strategy for change places great emphasis on the need for organisations to become more agile, more responsive and better able to serve the public. It also requires a higher standard of service delivery by encouraging collaboration between different public bodies  by sharing both resources and information.

These two aspects of government strategy require managers to introduce new ways of working with IT, while at the same time ramping up their levels of security after the numerous high-profile data breaches this year. Laptop security is an obvious priority as more of them are being used in the public sector but at the same time IT managers are expected to extend network provision to mobile workers and collaborating organisations.

This requirement often means lowering security measures . This is clearly totally unacceptable where sensitive information such as medical records or bank details, is being held. Computer hackers target public sector networks for financial gain. They take advantage of unsecured PCs or laptops and thus gain unauthorised access to the networks. A successful hacker can cause both financial and reputational loss to the organisations concerned.

IT managers must therefore keep the ability to control who can access the network. Network access control(NAC) software, once limited to the educational world is now being taken up by other public sector bodies. It gives IT managers the power to create and enforce security policies across the entire network regardless of the user's location or the device he is using.

Quite worrying then that a large number of organisations have no such software in place and therefore cannot prevent users from connecting to their network!

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