Pandemic Accelerates Priceline's 'Coffee Shop' Remote-Access Strategy

Pandemic Accelerates Priceline's 'Coffee Shop' Remote-Access Strategy
The travel-booking giant had been slowly starting to transition away from VPN dependence. Then COVID-19 happened, and suddenly 700 third-party call-center workers were working from home.

One of the biggest security challenges posed by the sudden lockdowns during the global pandemic has been figuring out how to swiftly arrange remote access for workers traditionally tied to office connectivity.


In many instances, the crucible of the quarantine era for security departments has accelerated security road maps, pilot programs, and early deployments of mobile-friendly controls that previously were only made available to select populations of enterprise users.


Such was the case at Priceline. Prior to COVID-19, the travel-booking website giant had been slowly moving its connectivity model to what its security leaders called the "coffee-shop model," where employees and contractors would be able to work from wherever they were. 


"It can be from Starbucks, your home, grandma's house – if you've got connectivity, then you should be able to do your work," says Joe Dropkin, cybersecurity and technology program manager at Booking Holdings, the management company that owns Priceline and other brands, including Kayak, OpenTable, and Booking.com. "Not only is that good for the employees, but it's also good from a security posture because we can say that the access from the outside is equivalent to the access from the inside, in that there is no access without all of the proper authentications and authorizations." 


The drive toward the coffee-shop model was so users could come and go freely between offices without going through contortions to verify permissions and authorization to the corporate assets they needed to do their work. Dropkin had been working for several years on moving the company to this model, even before when he worked directly for Priceline and not it ..

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