Pity the legacy network, still in use in so many organizations. It was designed mainly to support static employees using primarily corporate-owned devices—employees who used to sit in the office and access applications located in a data center somewhere on-site.

Two weeks ago I spoke at IP EXPO 2012 – London – where I presented on Enterprise mobility and the security challenges ahead. The following is a summary of the key facts I discussed; at a glance, you have to be able, as an IT manager or executive, to offer more granular control to the users accessing the network, based on who they are, where they are, what application they want to use and from what device, and all this in a controlled and secured way. It’s all about bringing control back to IT.

Skype in the classroom is free to users - and there are more than 22,500 of them. It's what we expect of the internet isn't it? Access to content that provides value to us but for which we are reluctant to pay. But, throughout history, content has been meaningless without effective distribution. So nowadays why do we value one but not the other? Neil Pound asks if this approach is sustainable.

From a conceptual point of view, it's all about our attitude to the risk. To keep it simple, we can distinguish three different main security philosophies.

In its 2011 Data Breach Investigations Report, Verizon Business reported that 17% of all data breaches in 2010 were due to internal agents. It is true that represents a relative decrease of 31% compared to 2009, but this is mainly due to the exploding number of breaches having external agents as an origin (+22%), which is not a surprise. The bottom line is that the absolute number of such internal breaches didn’t change much over the last couple of years, meaning that you still have to pay high attention to this phenomenon.

I’m not considering myself as a “geek”, but nevertheless, I’m using new technologies everyday to help make my job easier.

In my previous blog I set out how smartphones and tablets – and more generally mobility – are changing the networking landscape. Let me now discuss with you the steps that need to be taken in order to make your network “BYOD proofed”.

Looking backward, computing and connectivity have always moved along side by side. We have evolved from serial to Ethernet, thus gaining speed and flexibility, have introduced switching and have added different prefixes to Ethernet to gain even more speed. Then we have introduced wireless to attach some specific devices primarily for casual access. Now there is another shift; mobility changes everything and wireless is becoming the easiest and quickest way to connect devices to the network, while ensuring performance and security.

The UK government estimates shared services will save £500m each year on a current spend of £2.5BN. Would a private company pursue such a reward more aggressively?