Remote and Mobile Working Security

The transformation of the workplace that hybrid and remote working has produced represents one of the most significant security architecture challenges that the Security Consulting function addresses in the current operating environment, because the extension of the corporate security perimeter to the home network, the coffee shop, the airport lounge, and the hotel room that the mobile workforce occupies has fundamentally altered the threat surface whose governance the traditional office-centric security architecture was designed to address. The security perimeter whose boundary the network firewall once defined with reasonable completeness has dissolved into the distributed environment where the organisational data resides on devices in locations the corporate security architecture cannot control, traverses networks whose security posture the organisation cannot enforce, and is accessed by the workforce members whose operational environment the security programme cannot observe with the visibility that the monitored office infrastructure provides.

The Security Consulting function must govern the remote and mobile working security advisory with the understanding that the business benefit of the flexible working model whose productivity, talent attraction, and operational resilience advantages the organisation has adopted makes the complete reversal of the remote working capability an unrealistic governance option regardless of the security challenges its implementation creates. The advisory must therefore address the risk management of the remote and mobile working environment rather than the elimination of the business capability whose security implications the advisory must govern within the operational framework that the business model requires.

The Remote and Mobile Working Threat Landscape #

The threat landscape that the remote and mobile working environment creates differs from the office security context in the specific characteristics whose security implications the consulting advisory must address with the operational intelligence that makes the guidance relevant to the specific environments the mobile workforce actually occupies rather than the theoretical security best practice that does not reflect the operational constraints the mobile context creates.