Business operates in a digital world where we spend a significant part of our day connected and interacting with people, applications and information both inside and outside our organisation. For our internal IT environment, we manage access to applications and data in a formal way. But when our staff go out to the internet, we can’t restrict where they go. We have an “honour principle” that they will go only to business relevant sites. But if they sign up for a service, how do we know about it? Why is that important? The risk is that we may compromise our security and expose confidential and proprietary information. Not a day goes by that I don’t hear about potential security threats to business from hacking, malware, ransomware or an ongoing alphabet soup of risks. A recent market study reported that 80% of users access non-approved cloud applications (McAfee) and another study says that 68% of employees store work files on personal cloud services and that 45% of ex-employees continue to have access to confidential information (Osterman Research). Now, there’s a couple open windows we need to shut! So what’s the answer? How do you empower users and protect your business at the same time? Imposing more control on users is no longer tolerable. Users want the freedom of a unified workspace where all their applications are conveniently laid out for them; a workspace where once authenticated they don’t have need to login separately to each app; a workspace they can access with any device; and a workspace that is safe for users and safe for the business. And what happens when that person leaves the business? Years ago, before the internet, you would take away their access card and account login. But today, they have access to so many applications in so many places and have potentially stored so much information that you can only rely on the ‘honour system’ and your employment agreement. We think we have come up with a solution to this problem. It is a simple combination of technology and processes that fully controls access to internal applications and data and also to cloud apps and data stored in cloud apps. In the weeks ahead, we will be introducing an exciting new managed service that solves these business concerns. We are so confident it will do that job we will even include a no-charge version you can try out. For a short webcast on this upcoming new service, click here.