Today, it is not uncommon for the typical American employee to come to work with a smartphone, a tablet and a laptop. Bring your own device (BYOD) has adapted to the average worker’s need to be mobile, but it is leaving IT departments overwhelmed with security risks and concerns. So companies are turning to mobile device management solutions to be able to secure, monitor, manage and support mobile devices.
However, recent insights say that simple mobile device management does not address wider security issues. According to Eric Green, senior vice president of business development at Mobile Active Defense (News - Alert) Partners, mobile device management is not the same as security.
“There is no security in MDM; its ability to secure a device is nowhere near what it needs to be," Eric Green told attendees of the 2012 (ISC)² Security Congress in Philadelphia.
MDM suppliers and organizations are trying to put multiple point solutions together to meet security and compliance requirements, but that creates complexity, which is bad for security and it often breaks, said Green.
Mobile Active Defense Partners is a smartphone security company that offers a mobile enterprise compliance and security solution that secures a mobile enterprise to the most stringent compliance and security standards.
According to Green, in order to optimally banish security risks, companies need to provide blacklisting and remediation for bad applications, have the ability to clean or block personal email on a shared device, offer jailbreak and rogue behavior detection and remediation, support for multiple platforms via a single console and offer the same level of security found on laptops, including content filtering for all browsers.
Green predicts that application inspection and monitoring will become a big market in future and that it is likely to have cloud-based scanning at its core.
Luckily for MaaS360 users, there is a mobile device management solution that does it all. MaaS360 provides a unified mobile device management console for smartphones and tablets with centralized policy and control across multiple platforms. The solution offers mobile device management, mobile app management, document management, mobile expense management and laptop management to make your BYOD program run as smoothly as possible.
Users should keep Green’s advice in mind and take every precaution against mobile security risks possible. Mobile device management solutions such as MaaS360 offer fast and comprehensive ways to secure corporate data on mobile devices, but companies need to also take additional steps to ensure safe and effective mobile workforce programs.
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Edited by Allison Boccamazzo