Google is taking a new approach to enterprise security by moving its corporate applications to the Internet. By doing this the internet giant is shifting away from the idea of a trusted internal corporate network secured by perimeter devices such as firewalls to a model where corporate data can be accessed from anywhere with the right device and user credentials.

The new model called the BeyondCorp initiative assumes that the internal network is as dangerous as the Internet. Access depends on the employee’s device and user credentials. Using authentication, authorization and encryption, the model grants employees fine-grained access to different enterprise resources.

Analysts suggest that this type of model is needed due to the number of employees that use clouds and mobile applications. “A lot of companies can learn from Google’s aggressiveness,” said Jon Oltsik, senior principal analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group, an IT research firm. “There’s not a company anywhere that won’t have to develop something like this,” he said.

Google is currently migrating to the new approach and in the future intends for the entire company to utilize this model. According to a Google spokesman, so far about 90% of corporate applications have been migrated. With the new model access depends solely on the device and user credentials, regardless of the employee’s network location. Therefore, employee access is treated the same whether the user is at a corporate office, at home or in a coffee shop. This method does away with the conventional virtual private network connection into the network. It also encrypts employee connections to corporate applications, even when an employee is connecting from a Google building.

This new enterprise security architecture is a sharp departure from the way many companies currently configure security. Many companies depend heavily on firewalls to prevent unauthorized internet users from accessing private networks such as intranets, while this one won’t.

In your opinion do you think cloud based stuff is safer than in house stuff?