Ensuring Enterprise Mobility with BYOD Strategy

The arrival of IT consumerization has brought with it tech savvy consumers with a multitude of new age devices and equally adept at handling the latest technologies. Further, the growth of Internet led social media has also made the employees closer to their mobile devices. Armed with smartphones, tablets and new-age laptops, today’s employees demand greater mobility and prefer to use their personal devices at work. Enterprises need to embark on such ventures and provide employees with the freedom at work.

The BYOD (Bring your own device) concept is simple as it sounds. However, allowing employees to use personal mobile devices at work, the organizations face a number of challenges. Being in a technologically enabled and cybercrime filled business environment, the enterprises need to enable access to business applications without exposing the corporate network and avoiding any data leakage. Further, enterprises also need to make the changes in the existing infrastructure and applications to provide employees availability and access to business applications.

In an attempt to provide a cost-effective BYOD strategy, enterprises will need to work out RDP solutions enabling easy access to their remote desktop through any mobile devices chosen by the employees. Further, with the help of proxy architecture and RDP over SSL, enterprises can allow for anytime anywhere access to the applications and also ensure that data will not leave the corporate network. Such solutions developed by the leading service providers will enable seamless mobilization of the applications used by the enterprise and will also eliminate the chances of data leakage.

Reports from the online business community Entrepreneur Country claims that a simple strategy as BYOD at work can boost employee morale. Further, based on a poll of more than 300 CEO’s of small and medium enterprises showcased an affirmative response to RDP remote access and BYOD as a means to position their organizations as a flexible and employee friendly one besides being an effective business continuity planning solution. With technological growth enabling mobility and accessibility to business critical data and native applications across the enterprise with smartphones or any other devices irrespective of the location the enterprises are at risk of overloading of the corporate network.

While the use of load balancer distributes the load over the network, the appliance-based solution which is enterprise owned takes full control of the IT infrastructure and ensures closure of corporate network to third-parties. However, connectivity to personal devices is encrypted over SSL and the secure proxy architecture eliminating data leakage and potential attacks.

The innovative appliance based remote desktop access solutions have paved way for BYOD to make significant inroads into the business world. Today, with large number of employees across the global environment already using their own technology devices at work, has provided enterprises solutions that supports mix physical or virtual desktops and applications thereby maximizing the ability of the existing infrastructure while reducing complexities.

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Load Balancing

SSL VPNs

Improve Security and Enhance Operational Efficiency with Tablet Access Solutions

Thanks to the consumerization of IT, BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) is a concept that is getting popular these days. Since today technology progresses from customers to organizations, more and more employees want to work with mobile devices that they are comfortable with. BYOD is here to stay and is not a passing trend as it is believed to be. As per Juniper research, the number of mobile devices used in the enterprises worldwide will increase and may be it will be more than double at the end of the year 2014. According to them, the number will reach up to an approximate 350 million in the year 2017.

Many organizations are in support of Bring Your Own Device as it benefits them primarily in two ways. On one hand it helps to increase the satisfaction level of the employees while on the other hand, it helps to reduce the IT equipment acquisition costs considerably. According to Gartner, by 2014 approximately 90% of organizations will support corporate applications on personal devices.

Today Smartphones and tablets are in huge demand among the employees and therefore there is the need for Smartphone and tablet access solutions to securely publish enterprise applications for use on mobile devices. It enables identity-based access from any mobile device to specific enterprise applications in a manner that streamlines the user experience while improving security and enhancing operational efficiency.

Security is an important factor that makes organizations hesitant in embracing the concept of BYOD wholeheartedly. However, with the new generation tablet access solutions, enterprises can ensure security and protection as these solutions guard against attack and data leakage by leveraging a reverse proxy architecture that keeps mobile devices off the network. Here is a look at some of the features of a best of breed tablet access solution.

* Mobilize any application

The solution enables tablet access enterprise-wide, without the need for additional hardware, software or application licenses.

* Eliminate Data Leakage

Proxy architecture and RDP over SSL helps to prevent the tablets from connecting directly to the corporate network. Since the tablets are kept "off-network", it not only maintains the security and compliance of office resources but also eliminates the potential for attack. Thus, the data never leaves the corporate network, never exists on tablets and never mixes with personal data thereby fully eliminating the potential for data leakage.

* Reduce Complexity

It reduces complexity by being an ideal complement to existing native mobile app solutions and supports any mix physical or virtual desktops and applications. This helps to maximize existing infrastructure, minimize the need for additional hardware and software and expand investments in native mobile apps and virtualization in an intelligent and cost-effective manner.

Thus with a good tablet access solution, enterprises can embrace BYOD securely and efficiently.

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Load balancing

Secure Mobile Access Ensures Business Continuity

Today's business environment is not only technology driven but is also driven by the ever-changing customer demands. Further the aggressive competitiveness in the environment paves way for enterprises to be fully equipped with the world-class technologies and ensure a global presence. Globalization though provides opportunities for business expansion, also challenges enterprises with accessibility of the all-important business data from any location irrespective of the time. The demands for remote access solutions have led to the development of applications which enables mobility for the workforce.

The growing use of smartphones, tablets and other hand held devices ensures that the distantly located project teams and the mobile workforce of the global enterprises have uninterrupted mobile access to the corporate network. Further, the increasing adoption of cloud computing services through enhances the mobile accessibility; enterprises need to ensure security of data while traversing through various networks.

Remote desktop access has off-late become an incredibly valuable component of the IT infrastructure in an organization. However, since business enterprises are faced with challenges of finding solutions for application availability without compromising on security and productivity, the secure access gateways will help organizations in ensuring application performance. As a part of business continuity and planning, (BCP) it helps to improve productivity, save money and drive efficiencies. Further, to ensure uninterrupted business for the global organizations, the leading service providers have worked out secure mobile access solutions.

With technological innovations giving consumers smartphones and tablets with improved features, applications and accessibility, the leading service providers have developed solutions that can securely publish enterprise applications for use on these mobile devices. Irrespective of the device being desktop PCs, laptops, virtual infrastructure or terminal servers which run the application, the mobile access solution enables identity-based access from any mobile device to specific enterprise applications. This helps to improve security and operational efficiency while streamlining user experience.

In the process, the service providers are challenged to allow the mobile workforce to use smart phones and tablets to work remotely or within the premises, enable access to business applications from the mobile devices without risks to the data and corporate network. The service providers on the other hand have worked out solutions which enables remote desktop for workers to access their office PCs, laptops, virtual desktops and applications from any device, develop a proxy architecture and RDP over SSL for anywhere anytime access of the applications without the data leaving the corporate network and scalable appliance-based solution that is easy to deploy, manage and use.

Besides addressing the technology challenges of mobile access, these solutions also handle the business challenges of bring your own device (BYOD) thus, securely and cost-effectively mobilizing operations for enhanced enterprise productivity. Irrespective of the device the mobility solutions provide instant access to enterprise applications without the risk of malicious attacks and data leakage.

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Load Balancer

Server Load Balancing

Business Continuity Planning -Safety In face of Adversities

Every business irrespective of being a small and medium one or a large conglomerate is a profit oriented one. Technological innovations deployed in the business environment aids in globalized expansion of the business and leads to revenue generation and increased profits. However, any disruptions either minor or major may have serious impact on the day-to-day business operations.

Foreseeing business disruptions or the time when disaster strikes in an unknown factor and the globally bound organizations today are faced by the challenge of maintaining business continuity in face of all storm. Business continuity planning is one of the main strategies taken up by the global organization. Spread across geographical boundaries and remotely distant locations, these organizations need to be ready to face any disruptions in the business operations while ensuring that work goes on without any serious impact.

Business disruptions may result from various reasons such as epidemics, transit strikes, cyber-attacks, natural calamities etc. Under such circumstances a detailed remote access strategy and business continuity planning (BCP) will help the global enterprises to deal with emergency situations and help them to avoid loss of productivity or revenue. The remote access solution must be one that would help enterprises with:

* Secure anytime, anywhere access leading to uninterrupted business continuity
* Maximum performance, automated VPN provisioning
* Cost-effectiveness and global redundancy

A continuous delivery of critical services and products, demands that organizations need to have the facility that permits them to recover data, application and assets in a real-time access mode. As Gartner's analyst suggests that the most critical success factor to any business continuity plan is fast re-establishment of business processes. However, if the disaster recovery plans do not include Remote Desktop Access, no amount of technology can save business operations. Hence the real-time access to information will facilitate the employees to continue work from any location, allow business partners and suppliers an uninterrupted access to important information. Such actions will minimize the disruption levels of business processes and applications.

With large number of vendors offering business continuity planning solutions, enterprises need to make the most of the benefits to ensure productivity at all times. The enterprises needs to decide on appropriate ones and service types required for the business environment. The availability of applications from the corporate network and remote desktop access will help mitigate business disruptions. Application availability solutions from leading service provider’s offer load balancers and WAN optimization controllers for any fail-over for WAN links, devices and data centers.

However, the enterprises need to ensure that anytime anywhere remote access to business critical information also poses issues of data and network security. Thus service providers of business continuity planning solutions also need to ensure that the corporate network are equipped with secure access gateways that can support multiple access.


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Application Delivery Controllers
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Optimize Data Transfer Efficiency with WAN Optimization Controllers

WAN Optimization Controllers are appliances that optimize data-transfer efficiencies across a wide area network (WAN). It is a collection of techniques that optimize bandwidth to improve the end user's experience. WAN optimization controllers use a combination of techniques such as compression, latency optimization, forward error correction, caching / proxy, deduplication, traffic shaping, application acceleration, network acceleration equalizing, protocol spoofing, connection limits, simple rate limits to accelerate applications and reduce the cost of delivering applications over wide area networks.

Normally enterprise users experience great performance when using applications and services over a LAN. However, they face problems when accessing remotely the same applications and services over the WAN. Accessing applications across a WAN introduces network congestion, latency, and packet loss that can dramatically slow remote end user response time. Many IT organizations increase their spending by adding more network bandwidth to address these issues, only to find that poor application response time over the WAN has not changed. Moreover, with the addition of Virtualization, many enterprises are consolidating servers into corporate data centers. However, the consolidation of applications out of the branches and into the data center puts even more strain on the corporate WAN. In some cases, this degrades end user response time even further. That is where WAN or network optimization appliances come useful. The following are some of the benefits of using the best of breed WAN optimization controllers.

* Reduces remote application response times by up to 95%

* Reduces network bandwidth utilization by up to 95%

* Purpose-built to reduce the impact of network congestion, latency and packet loss which combine to dramatically slow end-user response times

* Application-specific WAN optimization blueprints and specific protocol optimization eliminates redundant, chatty protocol traffic

* Stream-based differencing avoids transmission of content already in the local data store, while compression techniques reduce the amount of data on the wire

* Window resizing, persistent connections and small packet aggregation dramatically improve overall TCP performance

* Supports 50% more accelerated connections as compared to alternative appliances

* Virtual appliances use minimal system resources, can reside with other applications and scale linearly with the addition of CPU cores, memory and disks

* Enables easier management of virtual and physical deployment, transparent addressing, statistical performance dashboard and auto discovery

* Provides centralized provisioning and management through integration with Virtualization management systems

Thus by deploying WAN optimization controllers, enterprises can ensure a premium application experience for all users and achieve rapid ROI by lowering overall bandwidth costs.

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Tablet Access

RDP

Ensure Complete Secure Remote Access with SSL VPN Solutions

Quickly gaining popularity as serious contenders in the remote-access marketplace Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) Virtual Private Networks are driving corporate success and increasing employee productivity and remote connectivity. As a remote access tool, it provides remote workers with a secure access to enterprise resources via the Internet by encrypting all communications between company networks and remote user machines. As VPN is the easiest place malicious attackers to get into a network, it is therefore important to have an effective VPN security policy to protect your company's critical technology assets.

Prior SSL VPN, remote desktop access needed administrators to install, configures, and maintains special software on the users’ computers. With VPNs being expensive and complicated to operate, remote access was only offered to a few corporate employees earlier. With SSL VPN all the limitations and concerns of remote access were done away. Offering security and control with unmatched safeguards for taking care of business-critical information, SSL VPN allows any computer with a Web browser to be used for remote access, with the SSL VPN technology

How it works

The next generation of VPN service, SSL VPN (Secure Sockets Layer Virtual Private Network) is available primarily for system administrators. SSL VPN functions to a great extent like traditional VPN, but adds additional connectivity and compatibility, utilizing the same encryption technology used by web sites to protect sensitive information. SSL VPN transmits data through an encrypted tunnel to a VPN concentrator, giving the appearance that the user is on the local network, regardless of the user's actual location. With integrated compression, connection pooling and hardware-accelerated encryption, there is fast performance for each user, even under the heaviest load.

Secure Remote Access

A secure RDP remote access VPN extends the perimeter of your network to the remote endpoints. An SSL VPN has been an entry point for security threats to enter the network. The ubiquity, versatility, and clientless nature of the SSL VPN provide significant business benefits and cost savings. With VPN or virtual private networking, there is a safe way for mobile workers to connect to the company's local area network to access their essential resources.

SSL VPN provides secure, protected access to resources, and ensures that the only traffic that goes through the encrypted tunnel is traffic that is approved by system administrators. The SSL VPN technology facilitates easy migration and makes it easier to deploy remote access solution than IPSec. Its balance of flexibility and function makes it exceedingly competitive.

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Tablet Access 

Unplanned PTOs- Ensure Business Continuity with Remote Access Solutions

When most enterprises talk about business disruptions, they equate it to major-scale events or catastrophic disasters such as H1N1 outbreak, earthquake, volcano, hurricane, power failures, or terrorist attacks. Hence, they engage in a form of business continuity planning (BCP) to protect against interruptions that disrupt continuous business operations. Even IT system crashes, communication failures and supply chain problems are included in the list of business disruptions. However, what these enterprises fail to surmise is that even events considered as minor and mundane can result in losses. Bad traffic, seasonal snowstorms, and even employees taking the occasional unplanned PTO (paid time off) are often categorized as mundane events. However, these mundane disruptions cost businesses money – a fact that even enterprises are not aware of. Let’s look at the impact of a mundane event like unplanned PTO on an enterprise’s bottom line.

PTO or Paid time off is a bank of hours that an employee uses at his/her discretion. Employees take unplanned PTOs in order to take care of an issue at home such as a sick child or waiting for a delivery or contractor. Here employees take PTOs to deal with some personal issues. However, there are situations where employees are forced to take PTOs for no personal reasons. Take for instance, seasonal snowstorms, bad traffic, transit strikes and so on where employees have no option but to be away from the office and work. These are events that can (and do) happen on any given day and prevent employees from getting to the office.

Unlike planned PTOs informed in advance and accounted for in the budget, unplanned PTOs affect an enterprise badly. These unplanned PTOs result in losses, which are greater than most would imagine. This is because employees take PTO without prior notice and therefore it may not be possible to adequately back fill their role. This results in neglected tasks and delayed critical business processes. Hence, what enterprises must do is not only develop business plans for critical as well as minor events but also deploy RDP remote desktop access solutions to ensure business continuity. Such a move would help save revenue by allowing employees to get to work, even when they cannot get to the office.

In the absence of remote desktop access solutions, the so-called ‘mundane’ events are not so mundane at all.

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BYOD

Mobilize All Applications with Advanced Desktop Solutions for BYOD

In this technology driven environment, many workers want tablet access to business applications, often from personal devices. Apps have become quite important in the last few years, making our work and life much simpler and easier. Enterprises may have numerous applications, but the security and cost implications of mobilizing every application can get daunting.

Many organizations are exposed to problems such as security gaps, compliance issues and rising IT complexity without proper solutions in place. To enable tablet remote access to personal iPad or Android devices, enterprises need a RDP solution that can be installed in the corporate network and integrates with Active Directory or similar to establish user credentials for secure access.

With a good appliance solution you can have Remote Desktop access that will make you more productive and generative, allowing an employee to work from anywhere and at any time. Deploying such a solution will enable tablet remote access for employees, and also allow enterprises to get a cost-effective solution that is fully secure and fully under IT control and at the same time provides full application availability, supports a bring your own device strategy and is simple to deploy, manage and use.

The BYOD phenomenon can make a tremendous difference and along with a good appliance solution that facilitates Remote Desktop access, employees can be more productive. These bring your own device solutions provide an efficient, cost-effective means to support tablets in the enterprise while preventing data leakage and providing full application availability. 

The appliance-based solution that you invest in must be enterprise owned and operated and not open the corporate network to third party networks. It must allow Tablet remote desktop connectivity to the end-user iPad and Android devices using SSL. A conventional PC work environment must be allowed to all employees unlike server-based computing. All employees enterprise-wide must be provided with complete application availability without any need for new hardware or software, licenses or application environments.

As tablets and remote devices are “off-network”, security and compliance policies on office PCs must be extended and maintained. This way data never leaves the network, never mixes with personal data and never exists on remote devices. It must leverage the existing desktop, application and security infrastructure. Look for a solution that is cost-effective and can be set up in as little a few hours and is capable of achieving ROI in the time it takes to set up alternate solutions.

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Server Load Balancing

Business Continuity Planning to Avoid Disruptions and Interruptions

Every enterprise face a number of disasters that ranges from minor to catastrophic. These disasters can cost enterprises money since disruptions and interruptions lead to lost revenues and additional expenses, which finally results in reduced profits. Besides that, enterprises have to face customer defections as well as loss of reputation and goodwill. This makes it necessary for the implementation of a business continuity plan that is effective enough to cover the occurrence of events such as equipment failure, application failure or corruption of database, malicious software attack, hacking or other internet attacks, social unrest or terrorist attacks, disruption of power supply or telecommunication, natural disasters, fire, and human error, sabotage or strike.

Wikipedia defines Business Continuity Planning (BCP) as a strategy that “identifies an organization's exposure to internal and external threats and synthesizes hard and soft assets to provide effective prevention and recovery for the organization, while maintaining competitive advantage and value system integrity”. Simply put, BCP is a collection of documents, procedures and instructions that help businesses to respond proactively to accidents, disasters, and emergencies so that business operations do not face any disruptions or interruptions.

The BCP process comprises of 6 key stages namely

* Project Initiation

In this phase, business continuity objective and policies are defined and drawn up.

* Business Analysis

In this phase, risk analysis and business impact analysis are performed. Then different business continuity strategies are identified and after performing cost-benefit analysis, the best strategy is selected. The budget for the BCP is also developed in this phase.

* Design and Development of the Business Plan

This phase involves the development of backup and recovery strategies, scenarios to execute plan, and escalation, notification and plan activation criteria.

* Implementation or Creating the plan

This phase involves the preparation of Emergency Response Procedures, Command Center Activation Procedures, Detailed Recovery Procedures, Vendors Contracts and Purchase of Recovery Resources and so on.

* Testing

This phase involves the exercise of program, objectives, plans, scenarios and actual exercise plan. In this phase, training and corporate awareness are also taken care of.

* Maintenance or Updating the plan

This phase involves the review and updating of the business plan.

BCP is essential in today’s scenario where the business environment is hyper competitive and volatile. BCP is easy now as enterprises have the support of business continuity solutions that offers availability and remote access solutions. This helps enterprises to not only have its core business systems up and running but also ensure that its employees always have access to the core systems.

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