Intelligent CIO Middle East Issue 05 | Page 78

EDITOR’S QUESTION Shams Hasan Enterprise Product Manager, Dell A digitally agile workforce promises exciting new opportunities for more flexibility, more convenience, and more productivity. However, enabling a mobile workforce has proved to bring equal parts opportunity and risk of data loss, primarily because in order to be productive in the modern workplace, employees need to be able to collaborate and access documents and information wherever they are. This introduces new complications: mobile devices are more prone to theft and loss, employees working from remote locations might log in to unsecure networks, remote offices are not always secured as thoroughly as the headquarters, and the fact that the evolution of security solutions is not keeping pace on the mobile devices themselves. CIOs need to consider the right IT solutions to transform and refine their business processes, at the same time – protect their organization and customers, comply with regulations, and enable the business and the workforce to adopt next-generation technologies faster 78 INTELLIGENTCIO than the competition. What is needed is a holistic IT Security Strategy that focuses on network security; data, endpoint and mobility security; identity and access management; and security services with solutions from the data center to the farthest endpoints and all along the networks and Clouds in between. It builds security capability early in business planning process, not just bolting it on after the fact. Business leaders should partner with vendors who can provide solutions that protect the entire IT landscape not just address a specific security concern – in the long-term this complicates and fragments the security environment. The mobile workforce is going to continue to grow as long as technology and workplace culture enables it, and before long, a new crop of security issues will arise to challenge busy IT teams. However, while the future of mobility is still on the horizon, the future of securi H\š\