Enterprise Mobility Management

EMM is becoming a “must-have” for almost every enterprise that has a BYOD policy.

Finding and selecting the right mix of security products to protect your company and your most valuable assets can be daunting. The variety of security solutions and standards when coupled with an increasingly regulated business environment can make the selection of the right combination especially difficult. When we add the complexities on enterprise mobility and new BYOD (“bring your own device”) policies, it can appear to be an almost insurmountable task for most IT heads and their teams.

Traditional versus “New Reality” Approach

It is now universally accepted and recognized that a company’s data is very often its greatest and most valuable asset. The ability to protect this asset is the most important priority for a CISO (Chief Information Security Officer) and his team, which must now consider a range of options. A traditional approach would most likely begin with an “NAC” solution (network access control), which prevents outsiders from connecting to the network. This includes monitoring and controlling mobile devise connections, which are becoming increasingly popular target for hackers. The approach would then add on a “UTM” solution (“unified threat management”), which essentially creates a gateway through which all users and data would have to pass before attaining access or terminating on an organizations' internal infrastructure.

Typical UTM solutions include intrusion detection and prevention, plus anti-virus and anti-spam features and capabilities. The final layer is usually a DLP solution (“data loss prevention”), which should combine and require the involvement of people in the organization, best practices and business processes to optimize security, and the chosen technologies to be configured and implemented.

The problem with this approach is that it may leave too much vulnerability during the implementation and deployment phases for each. In today’s world of immediate and evolving threats, it is incumbent upon the security stakeholders to recommend a solution that will provide short-term and long-term protection to the threat landscape. With the fastest growing segment of users of both private and public entities being mobile users and the multiple devises they are many times using, the approach should be holistic and start with a mobility focus.

This means that enterprises should really start with MDM (mobile devise management) and MAM (mobile application management) as the
“new core” or starting point of their security solution. This guarantees that an entity will have greater control over the myriad of mobile devises that are impacting their IT environment, from laptops, to smartphones, to tablets…to the new “phablet” devises that are now flooding the market.

Companies that are currently overwhelmed by the process of instituting and upholding BYOD controls, or don’t feel that there is a
legitimate threat, or have made the dangerous assumption that their tech-savvy workforce doesn’t need direction regarding safe use of personal devices, should now be considering the benefits of deploying a cost-effective, robust, and scalable solution for enterprise mobility management. The best of both worlds is one in which EMM is deployed as part of a holistic security approach that includes DLP, UTM, and NAC as a comprehensive approach and strategy.