Five Ways to Harden Mobile Security.webp

Five Ways to Harden Mobile Security

PostedOn: 2018-03-16 13:10:28

Businesses have risen to the challenge of securing enterprise resources and handling bring your own devices to a point. Enterprise mobile security has come a long way, and gone is the wild West where any employee could cart corporate data off-premise without oversight or protection. 

With that in mind, here are five ways you can get more proactive with mobile security in your enterprise. 

1. Invest in Employee Knowledge 

The people in your organization can be your biggest asset or biggest weakness. Most security breaches come from employee mistake, especially on mobile devices. So the first step is helping employees understand what’s safe and what is not. 

Most people know to call their credit card company when they lose their wallet, but many people take it as just a personal tragedy and fail to report a lost or stolen mobile device even if it has corporate data on it. 

2. Set and Enforce Mobile Device Policy 

Many businesses now have BYOD policies, but often they go unenforced. This can have chilling consequences because rogue apps and devices without passcodes are some of the most common ways that corporate resources are compromised on mobile, and it can be easily avoided with an enforced mobile device policy. 

In particular, set an approach for managing what applications make it on mobile devices. 

Businesses also would be wise to remain firm about basic mobile security practices if devices are carrying corporate data. 

3. Require Updates to Get on the Network 

Whether laptop or mobile device, running old software poses a clear and present security threat. In the age of iterative updates, software upgrades often are more about plugging security holes than delivering new features. Not installing updates when they are available is almost asking for a security breach. 

Yet, not updating is what often happens on mobile devices especially BYOD devices. So one way to harden mobile security is to require the latest updates before a device can get on the corporate network. 

4. Segment Within Mobile Devices 

Just as businesses should insist on updates before going on the corporate network, it also is important to build containers around the data that employees bring onto mobile devices. This can help both with control and monitoring security policies, and businesses can inspect these segments over the network to ensure they are being enforced. 

That does not mean that segmentation is a solution unto itself, though. 

So segment on mobile devices just doesn’t stop there. 

5. Probe in Real-Time with AI 

The number of cybersecurity threats that businesses now face would be daunting if it were static. It is only more daunting since the threat landscape is constantly changing. One way your business can meet the challenge is by leveraging artificial intelligence for threat monitoring. 

No human can adequately monitor all potential threats, yet real-time security monitoring is now all but essential. So businesses have adopted security appliances that probe for potential threats but the smart ones are taking this a step further by having AI do the probing. 

If there is one area that plays to the strength of AI, it is pattern recognition. That makes the technology ideally suited for securing mobile devices and data coming into the network.