Employees have long been valued as an organisation’s greatest asset. Nowadays, with greater enterprise mobility, they’re also considered an enterprise’s greatest risk. When it comes to your cyber security strategy, it isn’t just the technology landscape that needs to be managed, it’s also how your people use their devices.
Using mobile is now something of a reflex action. And as employees increasingly rely on personal mobile devices at work, the crossover of personal and corporate data on these devices has increased dramatically. In businesses everywhere, employees use their corporate credentials on personal devices to sign into enterprise apps and access sensitive corporate content on the go. They also routinely access their preferred apps over those approved by IT.
Update policies and education in your cyber security strategy
As part of your enterprise cyber security strategy you need to enforce strict policies and educate employees about mobile data security, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Mobile employees and devices, leaky apps and Wi-Fi networks all pose significant risk.
In its latest findings on cybersecurity published in the Telstra Security Report 2019, Telstra contends that security is now a whole-of-business concern for the C-suite.
Mobile security a big source of concern
While the number one challenge for security professionals remains the ability to detect and effectively respond to incidents in a timely way, their research found that mobile security remains one of the biggest sources of concern related to security attacks. In this country alone, 38% of respondents identified mobile devices as one of their biggest concerns.
In addition, managing the impact of new technologies such as software defined networks and IoT, as well as meeting the compliance standards for data security continue to challenge the enterprise.
5 pillars of cyber security strategy
In the fight against cyber security threats, organisations need to be more diligent than ever. A critical component in developing a cyber security strategy and protecting your data is understanding the threat landscape and knowing where vulnerabilities lie. And this requires a full and complete understanding of not just your network, but your entire supply chain.
Telstra has long espoused five things every enterprise needs to know to manage cyber security risk effectively:
- Know the value of your data
- Know who has access to your data – assessing the supply chain to understand who has access to your data, and determine if individuals should have specific permissions
- Know where your data is – understanding true security risk by ascertaining what information is stored locally, and what information is stored in the cloud within data centres across the globe
- Know who is protecting your data, and
- Know how well your data is protected – treating cyber security as a human issue, not a technical one.
It makes sense to use these five knows to form the pillars of your cyber security strategy, and leverage enterprise mobility management (EMM) tools to manage risk.
Leverage EMM tools to the full
Over the past decade, tools have evolved from simple mobile device management (MDM) through mobile application management (MAM) and EMM into unified endpoint management (UEM), which unifies and centralises the way enterprises manage their deployed devices.
As part of your cyber security strategy, it makes sense to leverage the latest mobility software to manage your mobile environment in a comprehensive and effective way.
