Outlook 2014: Trends in secure remote access

HAWTHORNE, USA: HOB, leader in pure software-based remote access solutions, has announced the results of a new survey, The State of Remote Access Security, which quantifies the trends and pain points CTO's and CIO's in the United States experience when utilizing remote access and how they find information about remote access solutions.

Remote access is a solution that allows convenient and highly secure access to centrally stored enterprise data and resources from a remote location. Remote access decreases administrative costs, increases productivity and enhances IT security.

"Remote access is gaining significant momentum in today's mobile and cloud-based global workforce. Ensuring IT security is a critical requirement for business functionality," said Klaus Brandstätter, CEO of HOB.

"The survey reveals the real concerns of CTO's and CIO's when implementing remote access solutions. This underscores HOB's commitment to providing secure access to remote desktops, virtual desktop infrastructures, legacy systems, data or networks from any device with our secure remote access solution HOB RD VPN," added Brandstätter.

When asked how many employees they anticipate will require remote access over the next 12 months, a large number of CTO's and CIO's predict significant increases in the demand for remote access. This includes 38 per cent of respondents anticipating a 25 per cent increase in demand with an additional 27 per cent expecting demand to grow up to 50 per cent.

Furthermore, the survey shows that after several years of financial belt tightening, senior management is ready to increase funding for IT budgets. 46 per cent of respondents anticipate their budgets rising up to 25 per cent, while an additional 31 per cent expect their budgets to go up by more than 25 per cent.

In terms of the most troubling remote access security issues for CTO's and CIO's, they are concerned with "hackers gaining access to the network during employee remote access sessions," (66 per cent), "employees accessing the network through their personal devices," (57 per cent) and "errors by the IT team leaving the network open for intrusions" (50 per cent).

Additional key survey findings include:

* 32 per cent of respondents have 101-500 employees in their organization that require remote access

* 59 per cent of respondents learn about new remote access solutions by reading publications that cover network computing and security