...or how to simplify the gateway in and out of branch offices

Today’s enterprises are anything but centralized. From retail to financial services, utilities to distribution, engineering to R&D, organizations operate wherever business is conducted. This has a major impact on how you secure the branch.

Like the Wild West of the 1800s, today’s campuses are becoming lawless places. Employees and visitors roam free armed with multiple devices, user owned and company supplied, and expect to connect to the corporate network, wherever and whenever they want to.

Recent research Juniper Networks conducted with the Economist Intelligence Unit across Germany, Japan, the U.S and U.K found that high-performing organisations that work with and rely on its IT department and subsequent technology insights are able to drive business growth and innovation within their organisations. The full global report can be downloaded here but I want to focus on the UK and German figures that emerged....

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.

Certainly BYOD is on everybody’s lips and is the most common and probably feared concern today. You can read about it in every single publication and blog, and all vendors – including those not associated with the topic which raises question of credibility – claim to have somehow a solution to let personal-owned devices securely accessing the network.

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.

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.