Improve Productivity by Publishing Services to Mobile Employees via a Web Gateway

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Rather than extending your entire #network out to #mobile devices via #VPN, publish individual services through a #web gateway or the #cloud.

Most remote employees gain access to Intranet resources through a virtual private network (VPN). Using 3rd party or built-in software, employees provide credentials and sometimes a smartcard to create a VPN tunnel. Once created, employees can securely exchange data with internal resources. This is anything but seamless and employees find setting up VPN sessions and re-authenticating due to dropped connections to be a hassle. They want to access things the same way they do on the Internet.

Let’s take a look at a better mobile reality. Most companies around the world use Microsoft Exchange for corporate email. For more than a decade, mobile users on virtually every platform have been able to securely sync their email without first creating a cumbersome VPN connection. This was possible because Exchange publishes its Active Sync service through a reverse-proxy over TLS. The email app is responsible for passing credentials to the server. It works the way mobile employees expect all their mobile apps to work.

You can do this too by publishing your internal web sites and REST + JSON APIs on port 443 through a reverse proxy that lives at the network edge. Reverse proxies are appliances or server software that let you create a multi-channel access gateway. Of course, when you move your workloads to the cloud, none of this will be needed anymore.

Improve user productivity by eliminating the need to create cumbersome VPN connections to achieve secure connections. What remote access technology changes are you making at your organization to make life easier for your employees?

Learn how to digitally transform your company in my newest book, “Mobile Strategies for Business: 50 Actionable Insights to Digitally Transform your Business.”

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Click to purchase a copy of my book today and start transforming your business!

Reduce Business Risk by Protecting Corporate Assets and IP from BYOD Employees

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Send “Bring your own Device” #BYOD #mobile employees to the #Internet via a separate Wi-Fi #network versus giving them direct access to internal servers.

Many companies today have a guest network. This is a separate Wi-Fi network that visitors use to access the Internet when they come meet with employees. Some of these guest networks require a password given to them by the person at the front desk and others don’t use security.

Now imagine a guest network on steroids serving all your mobile employees when they’re in the office and extending the data plans on their personal devices.

I’m sorry, but I still don’t believe in the concept of the trusted enterprise wireless network where mobile employees have direct access to internal servers. Compromised mobile devices and apps can unwittingly attack those networks and servers. Send them out to the Internet and have them come back into the Intranet through a secure path. Your company has already spent a lot of time and effort creating a secure Extranet for employees who need remote access. Put your reverse proxies, firewalls, routers, VNETs and switches to use for all mobile employees. Instead of maintaining two classes of access to internal resources, just reuse the one you already have.

Moving into the future, Intranet resources will disappear as everything migrates to the cloud. Concepts like remote access and internal servers will vanish and your super-fast guest network will look like a stroke of genius.

Reduce Risk to you corporate assets and intellectual property by blocking direct Wi-Fi access to Intranet resources. Is your organization allowing employees to access internal servers with their personal mobile devices?

Learn how to digitally transform your company in my newest book, “Mobile Strategies for Business: 50 Actionable Insights to Digitally Transform your Business.”

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Click to purchase a copy of my book today and start transforming your business!

Improve Employee Productivity by Delivering Web Scale to your Mobile Workforce

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Bring #web scale to backend business systems via adapters, replication, sharding, queuing & caching of #data to support a growing #mobile workforce.

Many of the backend systems running global business over the last several decades have something in common besides not being able to communicate with mobile devices. They’re not designed to support the scale needed to empower today’s mobile workforces. Actually, most of these packages and associated databases were designed for departmental or workgroup use in a world where everyone had a single PC on their desk. The IT infrastructures of most companies are wholly unprepared to support mobility.

Whether you’re wrapping your systems in REST APIs or using a mobile middleware package, you have the ability to boost the scale of those old systems using several clever techniques. For starters, the servers used to create a new mobile API tier should be designed to cache frequently-used data so repeated calls to the backend servers won’t be needed. This could range from a simple file cache, to using staging tables in a database. To scale-out this mobile API tier, data could be replicated across multiple nodes resulting in a sharding architecture that further spreads the load generated by mobile devices making requests. To further de-couple the system, data uploads from mobile apps could be dropped in queues and processed by background processes. All these things will have the effect of boosting both the performance and scalability of your existing backend systems.

Improve User Productivity and reduce expenses by increasing the number of employees and customers served by existing line of business systems. What is your organization doing to beef up its systems to serve more users and devices?

Learn how to digitally transform your company in my newest book, “Mobile Strategies for Business: 50 Actionable Insights to Digitally Transform your Business.”

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Click to purchase a copy of my book today and start transforming your business!