The H1N1 pandemic is pushing companies to upgrade their secure remote access capabilities in order to enable more employees to work out of their homes and other remote locations in an emergency. What they are doing is planning for scale," he said. Vendors of remote access technologies are reporting an unexpected increase in demand for their products over the past several months as a result of H1N1-related concerns. "What companies are really looking for is the ability to provide secure, remote access to more of their employees," said Michael Oldham, CEO of Portcullis Systems, a Marlborough, Mass.-based vendor of secure access appliances. "Most companies already have mobile workforces.
Much of the increased interest has come from government agencies and larger enterprises, Oldham said. "They are the ones that seem to be more aware of the need for planning. Secure access technologies such as those offered by Portcullis and other vendors provide teleworkers with secure access to enterprise applications from any location, using a broad range of devices. We have seen a number of these organizations purchasing lately with H1N1 in mind," Oldham said. They enable IT administrators to enforce security and information usage policies. Such tools can be vital to enabling business continuity during a pandemic, said Sam Curry, vice president of product management and strategy at RSA, the security division of EMC Corp.
These security enhancements are used to make sure that any devices connected to a corporate network from a remote location meets internal security requirements. Last spring, when H1N1 pandemic fears were at their peak in Mexico, RSA saw a massive spike in demand for its SecurID authentication tokens from companies with operations in that country, Curry said. The RSA tokens enable a company to implement two-factor authentication for accessing enterprise networks and applications. One company, which is among the largest producers in the food and beverage industry, placed an order for nearly 50,000 tokens to be delivered in a single day, he said. "They were fork-lifting thousands of these things directly to their operations in Mexico," to ensure they kept running through the worst of the crisis, Curry said. Many companies provide these tokens to workers who log in to company networks from remote locations.
But most other companies would need to do some advance planning to quickly expand their remote workforce, Curry said. The Mexican company, which he would not name, already had a well-established infrastructure in place and easily implemented the additional tokens, he said. As part of an effort to help companies support more teleworkers in a hurry, RSA recently introduced an on-demand authentication system that companies can use to enable workers to securely log in from remote locations. A worker logging in from home would go to a self-service Web site and request a one-time password to be sent to his mobile phone. Instead of hardware-based tokens, workers get one-time passwords sent via SMS (short message service) to their mobile phones. That password can then be used to securely log-in to the company's network.
SonicWall, a vendor of secure SSL (secure sockets layer) VPN appliances has recently added a 10-day "spike license" option for large customers that need to temporarily support more employees working out of their homes and other remote locations. Though the SMS-based approach is less secure than RSA's hardware tokens, they are ideal for when companies need to quickly support an expanded remote workforce, Curry said. The license allows companies that are running SonicalWall VPN appliances to temporarily increase the number of users that are licensed to log in remotely via VPN. For example, a company that might have purchased a 500-user license would temporarily get the ability to support 2,000 users, by using the spike license option. We have seen them alter their (business continuity and DR) plans in preparing for H1N1," he said. SonicWall has been offering a 30-day and a 90-day spike license option for some time, but decided to add a 10-day option to address requests from customers planning for the H1N1 outbreak,said Chris Witeck, director of product management at SonicWall. "We have definitely seen larger organizations expressing much more interest in incorporating pandemic planning into their disaster recovery plans.
SonicWall has seen greater interest in its spike licenses after the company introduced the 10-day option, Witeck said, and the interest is not limited to the U.S. market. H1N1-related planning exercises have resulted in increased demand for SonicWall's products especially in Japan where concern over the pandemic seems to be especially high, he said.
