Although there are many important benefits to making your enterprise more mobile, that doesn’t mean it’s an easily achievable goal. Unfortunately, for many businesses the opposite is true. We looked at 3 mistakes to avoid when implementing enterprise mobility solutions last week. This week, we will follow a similar route, by addressing several key challenges that business must overcome along the path to greater innovation and efficiency.
Ensuring Mobile Application Security and Accessibility
According to a recent study by Dimension Data, although 90% of US companies polled said that employee productivity increased greatly after implementing an enterprise mobility solution, only 44% of employees reported being able to access all the applications required to perform job functions. What was the primary reason for this lack of access? Mobile security concerns.
Because mobile devices are usually used outside a business’s security perimeter, cybersecurity protections like firewalls, spam, content filtering, and other traditional security tools are mostly ineffective, making mobile applications vulnerable to a range of cybersecurity threats, such as hackers and disgruntled employees.
To secure mobile applications and protect your company data requires strategically employing best practices to augment your enterprise mobility management (EMM) solution. Talking to a technology partner can help companies understand best practices, including:
- Use VPNs that provide strong encryption and detailed logging and authentication protocols
- Create strong policies to block unauthorized third-party applications
- Use secured mobile gateways to route mobile traffic through customized firewalls
- Implement security controls in order to provide another layer of data security
In the above episode of Real Tech with WEI, Chief Architect, Dave Fafel, talks about how to secure mobile devices off campus.
Providing an Appropriate Cloud Architecture for Mobile Devices
Mobile applications are not the stand alone applications of yesteryear. These apps are data driven and are ineffectual without access to backend resources. This not only requires virtual computing resources to service these applications, but requires authentication processes and credential controlled third party services.
In addition, users today demand continuous software delivery in real time. IT must combine Agile and DevOps practices in order to meet this ubiquitous level of deployment. Not only does this necessitate a highly flexible demand driven ecosystem, but compels both developers and IT support to work in cohesion with one another.
Ensuring Rigorous Compliance on Mobile Devices
Tracking the flow of protected data across your network can be a challenge, even for small businesses. For large organizations that have hundreds of mobile devices, ensuring strong compliance across these devices can be a significant challenge that requires the coordinated effort of several departments. As federal compliance standards become stronger and enterprise mobility becomes a de facto standard for conducting businesses, companies in regulated industries will have to exert serious effort to stay safe.
Create a complete inventory of all mobile devices that have access to company data and keep those records up to date. Don’t rely on employees to self-report devices. Instead, be proactive about gathering and updating that information, and keep it in a single, centralized location. Remember, each user is accessing company networks in different ways using a host of different devices. Try to collect access records for each mobile device, along with user identity data. This information can be crucial to mitigate the damage of lost or stolen devices.
Another important aspect of mobile compliance that’s often improperly executed is compliance testing. According to research by the Ponemon Institute, 86% of IT professionals in charge of mobile compliance testing do so in a decentralized fashion, spreading responsibility for those tests across different work groups, some of which may not fully understand the finer points of risk management, or lack the ability to perform those tests thoroughly. The resulting security gaps can exacerbate the security problems mentioned above.
WEI is Skilled in Driving Innovation with Enterprise Mobility
WEI is a trusted technology partner with a wide range of resources and services that will benefit both companies that are looking to launch a new enterprise mobility initiative, or increase the scale or security of an existing program.
For more information about the current state of mobile security, and for insight into strategies you can use to mitigate the many cyber risks inherent in enterprise mobility, please read our tech brief, “The challenge of Supporting Today’s Mobile Enterprise.”
