Remote and mobile staff need access to company resources, but giving it to them can cause security issues. The new AWS service could be a solution.
Off-premises workers need secure access to company assets just as much as on-site teams. However, while everyone at the home office is safe and snug behind the network’s ironclad firewall, remote workers are in the Wild West free-for-all that is the internet. Any trepidation the IT department might feel when contemplating the exposure of confidential and privileged information to such an environment is entirely understandable. So, how do you give all staff, wherever they might be, access to the resources they need to get their jobs done?
Amazon WorkLink offers secure access without needing a VPN
Now companies can give their mobile team access to the corporate-information crown jewels anywhere they may be, with greatly enhanced security. Must be some virtual private network (VPN) or app or something like that, right? Wrong. Solutions like those can be useful, but they can also be unwieldy and unreliable. Sure, they’ll keep data safe, but if VPNs and their ilk also make the data hard to access and use, workers will tend to bypass them. Amazon’s new cloud-based alternative, WorkLink, eliminates many of the issues.
With WorkLink, data is kept accessible but never leaves the building
WorkLink allows employees to access secure internal web content as quickly as they view any public website without having to use some Byzantine method of connecting to the corporate network. When a user accesses one of the company’s private sites, the page renders in a browser running in a secure container on Amazon Web Services (AWS). WorkLink then sends the content of the browser to employee phones, tablets, PCs, or Macs as a scalable vector graphics (.svg) file for pixel-perfect clarity and low data consumption. Why is this so secure? Because the internal content is never cached or stored on employee devices, and those devices never connect to the corporate network.
WorkLink is easy to implement and easy to run
Amazon WorkLink allows one-click access to a company’s internal web content no matter where it is hosted. The IT department doesn’t have to migrate content to AWS, and it works with all the infrastructure that currently exists online. Workers can use existing on-premises VPN hardware to create a point-to-point connection with the Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC). Or, just forget about the hassles of VPN and use AWS Direct Connect to create a dedicated network connection to AWS from the company’s premises.
Amazon WorkLink also works with Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) 2.0 ID providers, so companies can easily manage user access and maintain their existing security policies. Also, as a fully managed AWS service, Amazon WorkLink handles the deployment, capacity provisioning, scaling, and updates to the resources needed, automatically.
Best of all, when a company implements Amazon WorkLink, there are zero minimum fees and no long-term commitments. It only pays for the users who connect to the service every month, with no additional charges for the bandwidth they consume.
Is WorkLink right for your organization?
Does your business have to protect trade secrets and other sensitive and highly regulated (read HIPAA) data? Do you have members of your salesforce accessing internal corporate sites through smartphones and tablets? Do you need to provide a certain level of access to partners, contractors, and vendors? Do you have an ever-more-widespread team of mobile and remote workers all requiring ready access to your most secure data? Then we suggest that you need to investigate Amazon WorkLink now.
See how WorkLink can help secure your network
Don’t allow easily resolvable security threats worry you into sleepless nights. Let Amazon WorkLink be on-guard for you 24/365. You can be compliant and secure as well as accessible. Learn more by getting in touch with CloudHesive at 800-860-2040 or through our online contact form.
