Dell secures mobiles with single-app VPN

The combination of Bring Your Own Device models of working and overall business security remains one of the key issues the keep CIOs awake at night. The flexibility and agility of using the latest tablets and smartphones is still seen as equal and opposite to the lack of perceived security generated by using them. So the recent announcement from Dell of the release of an updated Secure Mobile Access solution may be welcome.

This provides mobile employees with Virtual Private Network (VPN) access between individual applications and enterprise data and resources, while protecting the corporate network from security threats. By enabling IT departments to create operational policies that restrict VPN access to a specified set of trusted mobile applications, the Secure Mobile Access (SMA) solution is designed to manage and secure access to business applications and data, while co-existing with personal applications and respecting personal data privacy.

The SMA solution complements Dell’s recently announced Entertprise Mobility Management solution, which securely manages both devices and containers. It enables IT to restrict VPN access to a set of trusted apps and prevent unauthorised apps from accessing VPN resources. This solution protects traffic from interception and keeps in-flight data secure. Both solutions are open systems that work with other VPN and MDM solutions.

The Bring Your Own Device trend and proliferation of both employee- and employer-owned mobile devices in the workplace has resulted in a mandate for IT to enable secure mobile access to corporate data and resources. While the potential for security breaches and the introduction of malware into the network can result from any type of mobile access, the risk intensifies with the co-mingling of business and personal data and applications when employees use personal devices for work.

To date this has required IT to use proprietary mobile applications, custom application development, and solutions from multiple vendors to support desktop virtualisation and container applications. SMA overcomes this by providing per-app VPN and a single-vendor capability for managing delivery and access levels to specific data and applications from any location, with personal devices.

It combines a Dell SonicWALL E-Class Secure Remote Access Appliance (SRA) with the Dell SonicWALL Mobile Connect 3.1 mobile application, to enable IT to easily provision secure mobile access and role-based privileges for both managed and unmanaged devices for tens of thousands of users. This allows administrators to configure a set of mobile applications they trust, and restrict VPN access only to those applications. An encrypted single sign-on VPN connection to the SRA appliance binds the VPN tunnel directly to the approved application.

In addition to restricting VPN access to the trusted set of mobile applications, SMA allows only registered mobile applications to access the VPN, stays mobile application and secure container agnostic, and reduces business risk by enforcing user compliance to personal device authorisation policy.

The administrator can customise terms of the policy based on communities, and SMA records devices registered to users, as well as the time of registration for tracking and audit purposes.

The solution also provides context-aware authentication that ensures only authenticated users and trusted devices are allowed access. Based on the user ID and device posture the SMA OS 11.0 can increase or decrease the user’s level of access to resources from a specific device. Policy-enforced network access controls connect the user to only permitted corporate data and resources.