More Devices Lead to More Mobile Security Weaknesses

Everyone wants to be mobile and at the enterprise level, it’s up to you to make sure your employees are not only mobile, but productive. One of the biggest setbacks for complete mobile adoption by employees is the lack of attention to what the employees want to use. Mobile is such a big part of our everyday lives that people are becoming naturally opposed to certain devices or OS’s they’re not used to and have no patience for poorly designed apps.

Employee preferences are often overlooked by decision makers and that can be the downfall of the usability. Put simply, if employees don’t like the way your EMM strategy works, it becomes useless in favor of shadow IT.

Employee satisfaction isn’t the only thing EMM strategies must have, apps need to be secure and file-sharing tools like Dropbox and Evernote need to be discouraged. In the even a device is lost or stolen, the risk factor of corporate data being compromised by an employee that uses public file-sharing is very high.

All that being said, these are all things almost any mobile device management (MDM) or enterprise mobility management (EMM) solution can solve if you ask the right questions when shopping for a solution.

Can the solutions manage any mobile or web app? Can it provide scenario based web access? Is it flexible in providing the right security situation? These are some just of the thing you EMM solution must have in order for it to provide your enterprise with all of the things you want with all of the employee satisfaction and security needs.

There is always going to be significant risk when opening up an internal network to a diverse array of mobile devices. In many cases, smartphones and tablets are neither governed nor monitored, meaning that they can introduce network threats and negatively impact an organization’s compliance status. There are three primary factors that contribute to enterprises’ security concerns: The sheer number of devices that need to be secured, the increasing level of mobile access and the proliferation of consumer-style file-sharing tools.

In a recent survey, Aberdeen found that best in class enterprises are three times as likely as all others to tie business workflow to users’ mobile devices. Yet, according to nearly every analyst study, security is the primary inhibitor to both enterprise mobility and bring-your-own-device (BYOD) programs. CSO Magazine recently reported that 17 percent of enterprises have already experienced a mobile breach.