Telecommunications
Regulatory compliance, particularly in the area of data and network security, remains one of the biggest hurdles to wider hybrid adoption within the telecoms industry. That’s because hybrid models, with potentially thousands of employees working beyond corporate firewalls, offer criminals a host of opportunities to gain unauthorised access to computer networks.
As a result, CIOs and their teams are now subject to an increased regulatory burden as the UK, and other jurisdictions, enhance regulators’ powers to scrutinise telecoms companies’ cybersecurity efforts and impose sanctions if they fail to meet required standards.
For example, from October 2023, the UK’s Telecommunications ACT 2021 will make the industry regulator, Ofcom, responsible for ensuring industry-wide compliance. Ofcom will have wide-ranging new powers to identify and reduce the risk of breaches, including the ability to inspect telco’s systems and premises to ensure they are compliant. The act also obliges telecoms companies to take the following steps to combat risks which are heightened by remote server access:
Carefully control access to sensitive parts of their networks
Ensure the right processes are in place to understand the risks facing public networks and services.
If a company fails to meet the required standards it can be fined up to 10% of its annual turnover. If a company continually fails to comply it can face a fine of up to £100,000 per day until the problem is resolved.
Protected digital workspaces
Telecoms CIOs should also consider adopting remote digital workspaces for teams dealing with critical applications or sensitive data. HP Anyware provides secure access to desktop environments, hosted on premise or in the cloud, to virtually any user device. All data remains within the hosted environment, with only encrypted pixels transmitted to users, yet those users get the same high-frame rates and low latency they’d expect from a local PC.
Boosting productivity and compliance
Speedy access to data and efficient workflows is essential to maximise productivity within the financial services industry. Unfettered movement of data, however, increases the risk of a data breach and sanctions from Ofcom. HP Intelligent Workflows, facilitates data sharing while enabling organisations to track and analyse documents and processes as well as enforce compliance standards, provide audit information and document privacy and security.
Meetings with presence
Hybrid teams may not always be able to have a spontaneous huddle or ideas session so virtual alternatives need to be as slick as possible. HP Presence is a suite of scalable, bundled options with hardware and services for meeting spaces of any size. It works with Zoom and Microsoft Teams rooms, interacting intuitively with users to provide an intelligent meeting experience and deliver useful real-time analytics back to IT.
Managing endpoint complexity
The proliferation of hardware and software within hybrid work environments can raise significant data security issues for telecoms CIOs, putting regulatory compliance at serious risk. HP, however, offers a suite of solutions designed to comprehensively protect against data loss. With HP Adaptive Endpoint Management, the workloads and infrastructure involved in supporting endpoint devices is taken over by HP service experts, releasing CIOs to focus their teams on business-critical projects. HP Device as a Service (DaaS) goes further, taking the work out of device provisioning and deployment, while ensuring that every worker gets the device that fits their needs. CIOs who would rather retain responsibility in-house can instead leverage HP Wolf Security, which protects endpoint devices across the network, providing layers of resilience and rapid disaster recovery.
