Network Access: It's Not Simple Anymore

People work digitally. So it's more important than ever for organizations to effectively manage endpoints and access.

Generally speaking, IT has used three different technologies to achieve this: Virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), Identity and access management (IAM), and service management. Those technologies alone are proving insufficient to address the new challenges of how employees work, however.

• VDI. Virtual desktop infrastructure is just that: infrastructure. It can offer an effective means of storing virtual desktop images and delivering those desktops out to users within the enterprise and/or working remotely. VDI itself does not, however, provide policy-based control over exactly which resources are on any particular user's desktop.
• IAM. Identity and access management is an essential gatekeeping function for allowing appropriate access and blocking inappropriate access. But, as with VDI, IT still needs a means of "telling" the IAM control layer which resources any given user should or should not have rights to at any given time.
• Service management. Service management offers IT a way of cataloging and managing the delivery of digital resources to users. Its focus, though, is on the services themselves -- rather than individual users and their appropriate permissions at any given time or place.

IT's challenge, in other words, is how to orchestrate disparate technologies -- including VDI, IAM, service management, mobility management, enterprise app stores, and the like -- to ensure that people get immediate access to the corporate resources they require to be optimally productive, while at the same time ensuring that people don't have access to resources to which they are not entitled.

(Image: Sigal Suhler Moran/iStockphoto)