Featured Article by Mike K. Brown, Vice President, Security Product Management and Research, BlackBerry
Anyone who has ever worked from home while waiting for the elusive cable guy, experienced airport weather delays, or been stationed off site at an event knows all too well that a reliable VPN connection is their lifeline for getting work done. That is why around the globe, businesses are rapidly adopting technology to allow for remote access, with an estimated 1.2 mobile workers currently accounting for 34.9 percent of the workforce.
The flexibility that secure VPN connections provide to employees is crucial, but organizations need to be wary of other challenges when keeping their network secure.
Despite its prevalence, industry analysts agree that secure, reliable VPN connectivity is one of the biggest issues for companies to effectively equip their mobile employees. While these issues can take many forms, one of the most common and frustrating is users’ inability to reach locations beyond the VPN server.
In time-sensitive industries like utilities and logistics, there is no room for dropped connections or extensive down-time when dealing with highly critical business processes and data. The cost of dropped connections can lead to a massive loss in productivity and business performance, not to mention dissatisfied customers and employees.
When was the last time you lost your VPN connection for just five minutes?
Now, imagine if that outage happened to you every day, twice a day, resulting in approximately 10 minutes of lost productivity. But the reality is that this isn’t just happening to you — it’s happening across multiple organizations, 250 work days out of the year.
This is where the real toll of an unreliable VPN adds up for an organization. In the above scenario, you’d lose 41 hours of productivity each year — that’s an entire week of missed opportunities, hassles and harm to the company’s bottom line. Now consider what that means for a mobile workforce numbering in the thousands, making the potential productivity loss terrifyingly risky.
How can your organization securely avoid this destructive risk and save time and money?
Opt for mobile connectivity that is built right into the work perimeter. Container solutions for mobile devices can provide an added layer of security, so that when an app is running inside of the container essentially, the “work” side of a device, the result is an automatically secure, always on, always connected VPN that effectively solves the mobile VPN connectivity problem.
Bypassing the need to configure and manage a costly VPN infrastructure enables users to save considerable effort and costs while still being able to provide mobile device access to data and applications behind corporate firewalls.
An end-to-end enterprise mobility management solution, a straightforward deployment process, and a global and flexible technical support model offers a secure and reliable solution that both enterprises and governments can rely on to support BYOD policies for multiple platforms.
Any well-designed mobility solution should provide your business with reliable extended connections across multiple geographic locations without using a leased line, improve security for exchanging data, and increase mobility for remote offices and employees. The flexibility of a secure solution enables your employees to use the business intranet over an existing Internet connection as if they’re directly connected to the network. These benefits translate into increased time and expense savings for companies operating virtual workplaces and improved productivity for remote employees. Maximize all of these benefits by building your mobility solution into your platform from the start.
A happy workforce is a productive one, and vice versa. Find a reliable connectivity solution that supports your people and secures your mobile data, and you’ll find that the technology can be capable of better supporting your bottom line.
Mike K. Brown, Vice President, Security Product Management and Research, BlackBerry
