Nortel Uses USB Drive to Secure Remote Work

Tag : USB

Nortel hopes to tackle the security of remote work with an "office on astick," a USB drive that can link an employee's PC with a corporateVPN and keep all the information from a session encrypted.
The drive itself, similar to a typical USB (Universal Serial Bus)drive with 1G byte or 2G bytes of storage, is just one piece of the Nortel Secure Portable Office , a product that also includes a Nortel VPN (virtual privatenetwork) gateway and services to help enterprises set up policiesand user permissions.
As work becomes more mobile for many enterprises, IT departmentsare coming up against the simultaneous growth of privacyregulations and worries about data theft. They commonly usesoftware VPNs to keep remote work secure, but Nortel is aiming todo so without the need for VPN client software or URLs (uniformresource locators) that employees have to remember. With thesoftware for a VPN session residing on the USB drive, users alsocan log in from almost any PC.
To use the USB stick, workers can simply plug it into a USB portand enter a username and password, said Rod Wallace, director ofsecurity services and solutions at Nortel. Software on the stickfirst checks the PC for viruses and required security mechanisms,and then sets up an encrypted remote session. It typically willprovide access to remote applications via the Web browser oranother method. It can completely take over the system using aremote desktop and block off printing, document-saving and remotedrives, preventing employees from improperly copying sensitivedata.
The remote session is encrypted and all data the employee enters ordownloads can go directly from the PC's memory onto the encryptedUSB drive, Wallace said. As a result, IT administrators can knowthat sensitive information isn't out in the world on PCs they can'tcontrol. Policies can be configured so that users who plug thedrive into less-secure PCs get either limited or no access toapplications, he said.
One place the Secure Portable Office has been deployed is withcommunity-based midwives who work for Liverpool Women's Hospital in England. They can enter and access patient records while awayfrom the hospital and keep them private, without needing clientsoftware or complex log-in procedures, Wallace said.
The Nortel Secure Portable Office is available worldwide. For atypical enterprise deployment supporting 100 or more concurrentusers, it costs between US$30,000 and $60,000 for the completepackage including services.