You wouldn’t let an ex-employee walk out the front door with boxes of documents, would you?
Of course, you wouldn’t. You probably wouldn’t even let a current employee walk out the door with boxes of documents, especially those containing sensitive information. They could be lost, stolen, or otherwise, end up in the wrong hands. It could put your entire company at risk, plain and simple.
So, why do you let them walk out the front door with their unprotected mobile device?
Think about how connected your employees are with their phones. Although oftentimes these are their personal devices, they do work on them, as well. Employees look at email, screenshot a PDF attachment, get on the company chat app; while doing all of this they could even spread malicious files.
Mobile devices aren’t just toys or items that make our lives easier and more connected, they are essentially hand-held computers. Their functionality, capability, and usability are the same, just in a smaller package. You can open the same emails, download apps to access company files, get on the company network, and contract viruses. With this in mind, protecting company data needs to extend to mobile devices. Implementing a mobile device management platform is now essential.
If you don’t have a way to protect employees’ phones, remote wipe sensitive information, and keep emails confidential, it is just as dangerous as employees walking out the front door with boxes of documents.
What is Mobile Device Management?
Mobile Device Management (MDM) is a tool or platform used to keep mobile devices, and the information on them, safe. This isn’t a platform for storing information from mobile devices; it is a way to keep company data separate and safe. From a separate work calendar to protected email and network access, this portal allows your employees to be connected without putting company data at risk. It allows for visibility into who is accessing what from their mobile devices, allows you to set up blocks, and gives you the essential increased security necessary to keep employees from contracting a potentially devastating virus. Much like having antivirus on a laptop, you should have MDM on employee mobile devices.
Mobile Device Management platforms do the following:
- Add a device to the inventory
- Push out security and app profiles based on user
- Provide a dashboard for increased visibility
- Pushed our alerts to all users
- Remote support is available
- Geolocation available
- Remote wipe of corporate data only
- Backup of data on the cloud provided
What about privacy?
We are talking about personal devices with personal information. This can cause some issues with employees who want to keep their personal information private from their employer. Not to worry, you cannot access any of the personal data on their device, you also do not store any information from a mobile device management platform. MDM allows for separation and does not store any data. Once a policy is in place, that is all the platform can interact with.
What are the security risks?
Having mobile devices on your network without Mobile Device Management is as dangerous as not having anti-virus on a work laptop. Keep this in mind:
- Ransomware has increased by 50% over the last year
- 95% of phishing attacks are tied to installation of software on a user’s devices
- 61% of victims are classified as small businesses.
If a mobile device can access your network and that device ends up with malware, your sensitive data can be there for the taking. Protecting mobile devices is not about trusting your employees with their own devices, but rather guarding against the ever-evolving schemes meant to steal your data.
