The growth in remote work has created new challenges around endpoint security, Parisa Tabriz, Google’s vice president for Chrome, said in a blog post, with businesses forced to contend with variety of employee devices outside of an organization’s managed fleet. “As these trends continue to accelerate and converge, it’s clear that the browser is a natural enforcement point for endpoint security in the modern enterprise,” she said.
Indeed, with many business apps running in the cloud, the browser is becoming the entire endpoint environment for many end users, said Phil Hochmuth, research vice president for endpoint management and enterprise mobility for IDC. The new features will allow IT and security teams to manage browsers “like a PC endpoint,” he said, “allowing for granular access control, data protection and usage polices to be applied to the Enterprise Chrome browser environment separately from the underlying hardware device.”
When managed-device-level security can be enforced at the browser level, he said, it’s possible to extend corporate apps and data access to more types of users, including remote or contract workers with BYOD endpoints. “It can help workers become more productive with a more flexible, but secure and managed, computing environment,” said Hochmuth.
