Ramesh Rao, who has been offered a plum post in a multi-national insurance company with its India headquarters in Bangalore, has a problem. He doesn't want to shift his family from Hyderabad but still wants to take up the new assignment.

He was pleasantly surprised when the new management allowed him to work from Hyderabad, agreeing to provide access to relevant applications on his smart phone and laptop. ?We want you to be with us. We don't insist you relocate and take weeks finding accommodation and school admission for your children. You can get to work no matter where you are.? This was the brief Ramesh got.

Sarala , who quit journalism for a few years to raise her toddlers, found an editing job in a Western magazine. She doesn't need to move to London. She receives articles for subbing, the pictures and the pages she is supposed to make, right in her drawing room.

Jacob, who works for an agriculture research company, bought an iPad on a recent trip to the US. His company has given him thumbs-up to connect with his team at the R&D facility, from the field, to update them with data.

These are not isolated examples of how more and more workers are getting hooked to their business environments.

That people are connected with their offices over phone lines and e-mail is not news. Working from home or telecommuting has been in vogue in new-economy industries such as information technology and IT-enabled services (ITES). But the trend is impacting even the old-economy industries as companies and organisations are beginning to allow employees to carry out their tasks while on the move or at home. In order to allow limited and secure access to office files and applications, they have begun deploying necessary technologies and IT solutions.

High-end Nokia phones, BlackBerrys, iPad, electronic data readers such as Kindle, Microsoft Lync and Office Communicator Mobile are slowly becoming an integral part of the office paraphernalia.

IDC predicts that there would be 73.47 crore mobile workers in 2013 from about 55 crore in 2008 in the Asia-Pacific (excluding Japan) region.

In a Symantec enterprise security survey, 77 per cent of the respondents indicated that they are witnessing growth in Windows-based laptops, 51 per cent in Mac-based laptops, 73 per cent in smartphones and 54 per cent in PDAs (personal digital assistant) in the mobile work environment.

Dr Ganesh Natarajan, Vice-Chairman and Managing Director of ZenSar Technologies, predicts that 30 per cent of all work would be moved out of the office in the next five years. ?New ways of working are evolving with broadband connectivity increasing significantly,? he points out.

?If employees can carry out tasks from home, or on the move, why should they waste time on commuting?? he poses.

This ?borderlessness' of organisations needs technology infrastructure that can link applications, users and end-point devices with operational processes and the network. This needs to be done in real-time and without falling short in any update on software.

A.S. Murty, Chief Technology Officer of Mahindra Satyam, feels that technology has had an incredible impact on today's workplace. ?It is imperative to leverage and harness multiple platforms creatively as tasks of different associates, teams and groups are streamlined through automation,? he stresses.

The IT major, which is recouping after weathering a storm, says the company deployed Digital Rights Management solution to protect all documents. "This solution restricts saving and forwarding the rights-protected documents. This goes a long way in protecting our intellectual property, while allowing the use of smart phones owned by associates," he says.

"The mail server has controls such as remote wipe, remote lock-out, approved device list and other security controls to keep tabs on smart phones," he observes.

borderless ecosystem

Shantanu Ghosh, Vice-President (India Product Operations) of the security solutions firm Symantec, says, "Indian enterprises too are witnessing a tremendous growth in the number of mobile devices that enable the office to be anywhere. This trend is primarily driven by the desire to be more productive and allow employees the flexibility to use devices and platforms of their choice."

With more and more companies taking to the mobile trend, an ecosystem is slowly building up. For one, Cisco has lined up 30 roadshows in different parts of the country, telling its partners and small and medium enterprises (SMEs) about the advantages, and strategies to be adopted, in order to become a borderless entity.

Mahesh Gupta, Vice-President (Borderless Networks) of Cisco (India and SAARC), says companies need to invest time and management time in order to factor in the mobile devices into their business and IT environments.

It involves deployment of necessary technologies and infrastructure that allows hassle-free conversation between different devices and solutions as employees ?talk' with their respective organisations.

"We have developed a Borderless Networks architecture that takes care of the fundamental concepts of security, threat control, data protection, secure connectivity and extends those to the distributed workforce. The platform focuses on SMBs," he says.

This gives companies and employees flexibility and freedom of choice to improve business processes without sacrificing control to enforce policy and reduce risk. "Our platform provides real-time collaboration experiences to any device. It also ensures policy-based access control and identity-aware networking to enable access and collaboration, while protecting critical applications," he says.

Security challenges

It is, however, not an easy task to let employees work out of the office premises and connect their mobile devices to applications in the network. This poses some serious security challenges to enterprise IT networks. Any compromise on this would prove to be detrimental to the business prospects of companies.

"We have observed that mobile devices are increasingly being targeted by malware authors. As mobile devices continue to increase in popularity, attackers will devote time to creating malware to exploit these devices," Ghosh warns.

As more mobile devices access corporate networks, often through unprotected pathways, malware writers and criminals will use this window to gain access to sensitive data, he points out.

The other big threat could be from lost or stolen devices as mobile devices are now used to store confidential business information and access the corporate network.

Quoting a Ponemon Institute survey, he says 12,000 laptops are lost, missing or stolen in US airports each week. If you consider that each of these laptops could have confidential data and intellectual property on it, the magnitude of the threat becomes obvious.

Another challenge IT managers face, as more employees become mobile workers, is the lack of predictability on the timing of their access to the office networks. They might want to connect sporadically and unpredictably.

Inconsistent connections make it more difficult for IT staff to ensure synchronisation between the enterprise network and the devices used by employees working out of office ? in terms of updates on Operating System, security software and add-ons to the actual applications. Non-conformity would pose compatibility issues, resulting in gaps in work flows.

>kurmanath@thehindu.co.in

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