Back5 Trends in Enterprise Mobile Security
Technology is crucial for enabling your organization’s business to happen in today’s world. But just as important is protecting your applications, data, network and mobile workers from potential security threats. Thus, below are five trends in enterprise mobile security and how to address them:
1) Employees Are Working Everywhere and on Multiple Mobile Devices
Years ago, most organizations only allowed a small number of their employees to work outside the office either from home or while traveling for business (from a hotel or an airport). And the majority of those remote workers typically used a laptop and a virtual private network to securely dial into their office to access any applications or data they needed to get their jobs done. However, today, thanks to new technologies such as the cloud computing and a wide variety of mobile devices (e.g., smart phones, iPads, laptops, and others), as well as a growing demand from employees, mobile workforces have swelled. Employees are now working anytime, from anywhere and on multiple devices. They’re also using a combination of their organization’s mobile devices and their own personal mobile devices to do their jobs.
While mobility is great for employees and for organizations looking to attract and retain the best talent, it can pose significant security risks such as:
- Most organizations have moved to the cloud, which means their applications and data are now frequently being stored and managed on third-party infrastructure. Consequently, many organizations no longer have any insight into where all their applications and data are, who is accessing and using those assets or from which devices (including mobile devices) they’re being accessed, or how their data is being used and shared with others. Worse, most of the top 10 data breaches that occurred this year happened because of third-party vendor and sub-contractor errors.
- Whenever employees use online applications without proper protection, it increases the area for potential security threats for an organization.
- Organizational data is traveling everywhere.
2) Data Crumbs Are Everywhere
Billions of endpoints are now connected to the cloud. These endpoints are continually generating massive amounts of data, including highly confidential and sensitive business and customer data. Unfortunately, this data is no longer just being kept inside an organization behind a firewall, but is now being stored, accessed and used everywhere (e.g., on a desktop computer in the office, in the cloud, on mobile devices, on third-party infrastructure, and so on).
This greatly increases the risk for potential data theft and data leakage. After all, if users can download data from anywhere and share it with others without anyone knowing who’s going to stop them? But not having the visibility into where and who has access to your confidential data is the real threat.
3) Employees Are Accessing and Using Email Everywhere and on Multiple Devices
Because employees are working everywhere, they’re also accessing and using their email wherever they go and on multiple devices. Cybercriminals know this and are frequently using email to launch phishing, ransomware, malware and other security-related attacks to try and take data out of an organization’s environment. In many cases they’re also going after the most mobile and senior people in an organization who are most likely to have access to confidential or sensitive business data.
4) Wide-Spread Use of Software-as-a-Service Applications
Many organizations and employees today use third-party software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications such as cloud applications, cloud storage, human resources applications, accounting applications and others to get work done. Many SaaS applications make it easy for users to download data and share it with others without anyone knowing, including third parties and unauthorized individuals.
5) Digital Disruption
Digital disruption is forcing many organizations to update their IT infrastructure to improve their online customer experience and provide faster service to their customers. As part of this process, many organizations are creating new applications for their customers to use. While these online services and applications are helpful to customers, the downside is whenever you open your organization’s applications and environment up to customers or third parties, it greatly increases the potential for security risks, as well as data theft and data leakage.
Hence, organizations must be a lot more proactive about protecting and securing their applications, data, network and mobile workers. Here are a few ideas on how to do that:
- Identify all the platforms and data that are currently being used in your environment.
- Assess the potential risks of every platform and application your organization and employees use.
- Understand how all the data gets generated in your environment and who has access to it.
- Identify the most mobile and senior individuals within your organization who have access to confidential data and are most likely to be targeted by cybercriminals, and then increase their mobile security.
- Know the sources from where all your organization’s emails are coming and who are the most targeted people for email spamming and spoofing in your organization.
- Implement the right processes and controls to secure your organization’s assets and mobile workers.
- Implement a Security Awareness Program to educate your employees on potential security threats so they can help you identify and stop them in real-time.
For more information on enterprise mobile security visit https://myriad360.com
