Businesses warned not to underestimate remote working challenges during London 2012

Remote working during the Olympics raises a number of serious access management challenges, according to security management provider Firemon's general manager EMEA, Bernard Zelmans.

In an interview with Computing, he said: "It is key to put mechanisms in place for mobile working and for backing up tablets and mobile devices.

"However, when an organisation has a lot of people using the network, getting access to resources is the issue. To try to improve access, companies open up their networks for more applications and services to help people who usually don't come in remotely," he said.

Another issue for enterprises is altering IT policy, Zelman added.

"From a security perspective, it brings in some additional challenges, as enterprise IT is already complex with many rules, and suddenly an organisation has to try to modify them," he said.

"They need to change the rules needed to allow authentication of people or groups to have different access to different things on the network, and that brings in another dimension of complexity."

The third challenge is traffic management, Zelman explained.

"Depending on the VPN solution an enterprise is using, traffic management control could also be a challenge. If, for example, all employees are using the VPN, an organisation has to have an enormous amount of bandwidth. Furthermore, the company would have to control what applications can be used as people may be using it to stream high definition online content," he added.

Zelman concluded that enterprises should carry out additional auditing to make sure their applications and services are not "too open".