Unleash Mobility With Security

By Bill Vass, Senior VP and CIO, Sun Microsystems, Inc.

More than ever, companies are increasingly looking for solutions that will provide access to their data anywhere, at any time and on any device. This quest for mobility with security has completely changed the look and meaning of desktop computing.

Mobility means more than wireless. It's more than desktop computing. It's about providing secure information to consumers, inventory managers, executives, teachers, financial advisors, emergency medical technicians -- practically anyone, no matter where they are. It's about making valuable information as mobile as the person who uses it.

The industry has followed a personal-device model. Whether it's a phone number held only in a handset, or personal data stored in a PDA, valuable information is being unnecessarily "trapped" and jeopardized.

There's a better way, and it revolves around the notion of a personal network that's secure and authenticated. It's about managing valuable information in a secure, monitored, backed-up, professionally administrated data center. It's about making this information available via whatever device people choose.

As the enabling infrastructure evolves, the worldwide network of things will continue to grow. At Sun campuses, employees are already living this mobile lifestyle, working without assigned offices and saving millions of dollars in avoided real estate and system administration costs. Using stateless network appliances and Java badges, they access their information within seconds, no matter where they go on campus -- the network really is their computer.

The Java badge is a smart card solution for network security and physical access control. The cards have a magnetic stripe for access control. The user can put the card in a reader, and it will roam the network, find the person's desktop and deliver it to the monitor, PDA or other access device. No CPU is needed on the desktop and information delivery is secure.

The main reason Sun and others are adopting smart cards is to implement logical access to the company's network using thin clients. At Sun, we have flexible offices for thousands of employees, meaning they are not tied or assigned to a specific office. It enables us to deliver IT services in a very cost effective manner because all sessions reside on servers. The smart card is the key to the system.

For example, if you want to leave for a meeting, you can pull out your smart card from the client, which then powers down to save energy. When you return, you go to another office and use your card to get your session back up again. Once you insert the smart card into the appliance it powers up, gets your personal session from the appliance and takes you right back to your personal session where you left off.

Sun calls it ‘Session Mobility,’ which is being able to carry your user environment from one area to another.

It’s technically safer to store PIN and key information on smart card hardware tokens rather than on a computer hard drive in some server room. It eliminates the inefficient use and inherently weak security of passwords.

So, the desktop is changing. The work environment is changing. Mobility with security as a theme is driving the evolution to a truly networked worker and workplace.