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Webinar: Branch Offices, Local Security

by Entrust Datacard Blog on July 13, 2018

One of the things I appreciate about Entrust Datacard is its embrace of different working styles, particularly its support of remote work. I’ve been with the company for almost two years now, but I don’t live in Minnesota, or Ottawa, or Dallas, or any of the other major offices. I live in the Boston area, and when I applied for the job at Entrust Datacard, they respected my lifestyle and desire to not uproot my family. So I work remotely, going into our small office in Waltham, Massachusetts a couple of times a week (and becoming quite familiar with the MSP and YOW airports!). The Waltham office has about a dozen colleagues in it; while I rarely work closely with them on projects, having some colleagues nearby provides a great balance of flexibility and feeling connected to the organization. It’s nice to have some human interaction sometimes. (That’s me on the right in the group photo – the Waltham team went for ice cream at the beginning of June.)

Remote and branch offices, like Waltham, are a fact of life in today’s enterprises, but more than that, they are a business necessity and an advantage. For one thing, branch offices allow you to place teams closer to the customers, so you can better address local customs and regulations. For another, many of today’s workers look for flexibility in job opportunities. They don’t necessarily expect to relocate for jobs, and they won’t. If enterprises want to attract and retain top talent, they need to provide flexibility, and that often means offering remote work. So branch offices and remote work become not just a business necessity but a competitive advantage.

And one of the jobs of the security team is to support that competitive advantage. That isn’t always easy. Small remote offices like Waltham often present challenges to IT and IT Security professionals. Security policies may not have been developed with branch offices in mind.

The number of endpoints to manage is increasing exponentially. Authentication practices in remote offices may be weak. And you rarely have dedicated IT staff in a branch office.

This is where PKI can be more than a nice to have – it can be a business enabler and necessity. In the following webinar, I talk about how PKI can address the security challenges of branch offices and walk through a case study of a customer that used PKI to secure their branches and transform their business.