Company security is LITERALLY in the hands of your employees
Tuesday, March 9th, 2010 Karen Ambrose Hickey, Editor
Today’s business leaders have quickly embraced the many benefits of using the cloud, leveraging enterprise mobility and social media applications to drive productivity, efficiency, collaboration, and innovation across their organizations. But do they know what their employees are actually doing with all of those PDAs, smartphones, and other mobile devices? Are they confident that all corporate security issues are being dealt with in timely and efficient manner?
IT used to be in control over what everybody did. Now employees have the ability to go out and purchase mobility technologies on their own, contributing greatly to enterprise security risks. IT teams are working long hours to keep up with the pace of change. But by the time IT gets one technology up and running, a new technology has already cropped up.
Data security is (literally) now in your employees’ hands. With the increased adoption of cloud-based computing, the enterprise control point is moving from corporate IT and the VPN gateway to the Internet connection. What about the fact that your employees don’t carry their personal apps on their laptops or phones anymore? Those apps are actually URLs to Internet-based programs and data. Laptops and phones have now become “blurred use” devices as employees do their personal tasks through the URL from their mobile devices.
IT and security teams now have many more questions to ponder and decisions to make:
- Should employees be allowed to use personal devices to connect to the corporate network?
- Are all employee devices password-protected?
- Do employees need to use VPNs to access all of the company’s internal applications?
- While on the Internet, are the firewalls still running?
- Do all devices have up-to-date antivirus software installed?
- Can employees install any apps they choose onto their mobile devices, or does IT have to approve and install?
- Does IT have the ability to monitor wireless connections to look for suspicious activities?
- Can IT authenticate and authorize appropriate Internet sessions?
- Does IT have the ability to disconnect users from the Internet when they break policies?
- Does IT have the ability to identify and disable the potential connection from a lost device?
If you are like most organizations, you probably can’t answer all of those questions easily or with a high degree of certainty. (If you can answer with conviction, tell us your secrets!) Enterprise mobility management has become chaotic, unpredictable, and out of control. The bottom line is that you can’t manage what you can’t see.
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Tags: enterprise mobility, mobile workforce, mobility management, Security, vpn
