Cloud-based security solution can provide small businesses with a protective umbrella. According to IDC's Worldwide Mobile Worker Population study, there will be one billion mobile workers by the end of 2011 - that's almost three and a half times the size of the entire UK workforce.
Webroot's own recent investigation into the growth of mobile working found that this may be happening even faster within the small business community. Its survey revealed that 98% of companies allow at least some of their employees to access the corporate network remotely, indicating that SMEs have wholeheartedly embraced mobile working.
From enhancing productivity to supporting employees' work-life balance in a bid to attract and retain the best talent for their organisation, the benefits of working on the go for SME's are clear. The pull factor exuded by mobile working explains why so many businesses have adopted the technology, but in their haste, many are doing so without a full understanding of the risks to which they may be exposing their business.
As roaming grows, so does the threat to your computer systems. Understanding how to stop your mobile workers from becoming an unwanted and highly dangerous source of infection is rapidly becoming a crucial challenge for business managers. For many SMEs, traditional mobile protection mechanisms deployed on-site may not be sufficient. Many 'road warriors' are absent from the office for days at a time, making it difficult to centrally manage their computing equipment. In the face of the continuing explosion in malware variants, the challenge for IT managers to maintain desktop antivirus software becomes even tougher.
Gateway protection, in which laptops are protected by an appliance software product on an organisation's network, can also be difficult to manage in a mobile context. This requires roaming users to point their machines to the corporate network which then routes them back out to the internet.
Employing this method strains corporate network resources and requires traffic to travel to the other side of the globe. It also creates a single point of failure. If a company's gateway appliance fails or if the virtual private network software that encrypts the data between the laptop and the corporate network becomes overloaded, employees are likely to find themselves without access to the Web, which in today's Internet dependent environment, could deal a devastating blow to your business.
An alternative option for managing network security is called Security-as-a-Service (SaaS), whereby a third-party security provider manages the services required to protect your business against spam, viruses, spyware and other malware. Often referred to as operating in the cloud, this approach carries a host of benefits. It provides more protection than is possible on a single remote device (an important fact as SMEs adopt slimmed-down netbooks). As malware writers employ increasingly sophisticated techniques to infect your employees' systems, the more computing power that you can direct to analysing it, the better. SaaS also eliminates the need for updating because software is constantly kept up-to-date in the cloud.
In the current climate where budgets are extremely stretched, SaaS offers a compelling financial model. Rather than having to heavily invest upfront in often dormant licenses, the pay-as-you-go nature of SaaS allows SMEs to accurately match IT expenditure with business needs. Additionally as economic confidence returns, the flexibility it offers will allow you to quickly, easily and cost-effectively scale up access to security solutions as requirements grow.
Secondly, SaaS helps reduce the IT burden. This is a familiar issue to many SMEs who are struggling with limited financial and manpower resources. As the solution is managed by the service provider, your IT resource can deliver other business critical projects.
When choosing an option so dependent on the quality of service, selecting a vendor who can offer a service level agreement which ensures that your employees will not be stranded and your business remains continually protected is paramount. So what should you look for?
Choose a vendor that can balance its traffic effectively and route through the closest data centres to you in order to minimise latency and better manage response times for a transparent user experience. Look for a partner that can also use its service to enforce your company IT usage policies. Webroot's research highlighted that 95% of companies have an internet use policy prohibiting access to specific Websites and forbidding certain online activities, so for SMEs the use of SaaS to drive enforcement already placed in delivering such protocols serves as further return on investment.
Placing protection in the cloud does not mean sacrificing functionality. In fact, it truly offers the ability to better manage your security and delivers an umbrella of safety that no modern organisation with a mobile workforce can afford to do without.
For more information please visit www.webroot.co.uk
