Don’t Overlook the Mobile Devices Accessing Your Network

The number of employees using their personal devices for work purposes (BYOD) continues to increase rapidly. According to Juniper Research, BYOD will account for over one-third of all mobile devices being used within the next few years. Not adjusting procedures to accommodate for this trend can leave your company's sensitive information vulnerable.

We've talked a lot about how hackers are targeting BYOD devices in order to breach a company's network and steal their sensitive data. Experiencing a hack of this nature is bad news for any business, but BYOD brings to the table more risks than just targeted hacking of your company's network. Another major BYOD risk that can disrupt your business comes from mixing personal and corporate cloud applications on a single device.

Problems that come from having multiple cloud services co-exist on the same device isn't exclusive to BYOD. Even if your company provides staff with devices, employees can still use the device for both work and personal purposes. You will want to take precautions to protect your data by properly managing all mobile devices used for your business.

Without proper oversight, a company's project workflow could be disrupted by an employee using a personal app to get company work done. For example, a project would experience a serious setback if an employee accomplished a significant amount of work on it using a personal app, only to then have something happen to their mobile device like a theft.

If the project was saved over a cloud application that you control, you would be able to quickly block the stolen phone from accessing the project to ensure its safety. However, if the employee saved the project to a personal cloud app, then the thief would have access to it from the employee's stolen phone and you would be powerless to stop them. Additionally, whatever progress the employee made on the project using their personal app would be lost for good, meaning that the entire team would have to go back to the point from when the project was last saved on the company network.

One way that a nightmare scenario like this can unfold is if you let anybody and everybody do company work on their mobile devices without taking any precautions. You will want to educate everyone in your company of the importance of staying vigilant with mobile security best practices, and you will want to take steps to enact policies that will ensure projects are only worked on using approved company apps.

The importance of using approved apps for business projects boils down to security. Business applications may have greater security than a free app downloaded from Google Play or iTunes. Alan Tan, senior consulting analyst at Info-Tech Research Group told Processor that, "Some of the services may be suitable for private users but may not suffice for enterprise environments. Usually, personal cloud services/applications have less security controls than enterprise-level services/applications and are more vulnerable to the increasing security threats and attacks." You will especially want to make sure that only enterprise-level applications are being used when dealing with sensitive information like business plans, audit results, patent information, customer billing information, sensitive employee data, and more.

Macro Systems can help your business put the right protections in place on mobile devices accessing your network in order to keep your company's sensitive data safe. We can also equip your business with mobile management tools that will provide you with visibility of network activity so that you can check on employee compliance with your mobile device policies, as well as block apps that are known security threats. To equip your business to properly handle the challenges of going mobile, give Macro Systems a call at 703-359-9211.