It's one of IT's biggest problems: How do you secure  mobile workers? To comprehensively address that question, Net security and DNS provider OpenDNS announced Tuesday a new cloud -based security service for mobile workers.
Called Umbrella, the new service is designed for iPhones, iPads, Windows and Mac laptops, and is intended to offer granular network security for distributed offices, retail locations or Wi-Fi hotspots. Administrators utilize a cloud-based management dashboard, which allows them to define policies, provision devices, and view reports across users, sites, networks, groups, or devices.
DNS, Proxying, VPN
The service employs OpenDNS' Global Network, which has 50 million daily users and which the company said is the world's largest Net-wide security network. It has a dozen global data centers that OpenDNS said have had 100 percent uptime since the Network's inception in 2006. The DNS-based approach, according to the company's Web site, provides "enterprise -class Internet threat protection and Web filtering without impacting network resources or becoming a bottleneck for network traffic ."
OpenDNS said that security vendors have not delivered solutions for the growing "bring your own device " (BYOD ) trend in businesses because they have not embraced software -as-a-service (SaaS) applications, cloud services and the ramifications of a completely mobile workforce . The company said that appliance-based solutions diminish performance and increase latency by requiring a backhaul of traffic through corporate network-housed hardware.
By contrast, OpenDNS said, Umbrella improves performance through a combination of its Anycast DNS routing, selective proxying and encrypted VPN connections to the cloud, instead of routing back to the corporate network.
David Ulevitch, OpenDNS founder and CEO, said in a statement that Umbrella "perfectly illustrates our belief that Internet security can be as ubiquitous as connectivity , while still being simple, smart and lightweight." He added that the new service shows how companies can provide security everywhere, through a combination of "secure connections, unlimited performance, global threat intelligence, global visibility, and low total cost of ownership." (continued...)
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