The five Mobile Security and Management nightmaresAnd how to wake up before they take hold

For companies withpeople in them™

When it comes to increasing employee productivity and meeting customer needs, mobile devices and apps can be a dream.

Anytime, anywhere access to your corporate apps, data and intranet means your people are always in the loop–and always able to work.

…But unless the devices your people use are secure, and the data on them protected, that dream can soon turn into a nightmare.

A nightmare where the threat of lost data, damaged reputation, regulatory penalties and ugly lawsuits are always looming.

That nightmare is much harder to avoid when you do the smart, modern thing, and let people bring their own devices.

The thing is: it’s not your device any more. It’s theirs.Your people won’t want you sifting through the private information on their personal devices, even if it’s to protect the business.

And they won’t like being told which apps they can and can’t use –not without a very, very good reason.

Unfortunately, your IT people can’t be everywhere.

With so many devices coming in and out of your workplace, you need a smart, sensitive, tech-enabled strategy for managing them.

Without it, you may find yourself deep in any one of the following Mobile Security and Management (MSM) nightmares…

The Five MSM Nightmares

The Plague of Devices: More devices, more devices…

There are now more mobile devices in the world than there are human beings.

How many of them are in the bags and pockets of your people, whether they’re corporate or user-owned?

How many of them are in the bags and pockets of your people, whether they’re corporate or user-owned?

Enough to give your IT people plenty of sleepless nights.

And they’re all different. With specific combinations of hardware, operating system, firmware version and apps. This sheer variety is itself a management nightmare.

There are now more mobile devices in the world than there are human beings.

How to wake from this nightmare

To cope with this ever-growing swarm of devices, IT needs special powers.

It needs to be able to:

• Enroll devices in your environment quickly, configuring and updating settings over the air

• Let people provision their own apps from a company app store

• View all enrolled devices (regardless of ownership) through a single console

• Manage devices by ‘profile’ –e.g. by operating system, or device ownership type

• Automatically push appropriate apps and content

• Define use policies

All these Mobile Device Management (MDM) powers help IT tame the device explosion, and help prevent the kind of security crises which true nightmares are made of.

You don’t want to do this job with spreadsheets and email.

The Sudden Leaver: Is your data leaving with them?

People who leave your company–however happy the circumstances and great the leaving party–may find that they’re taking a lot of sensitive corporate data with them.

The same applies to that freelancer who’s necessarily been dipping in and out of your systems during the course of their employment.

Whether someone accidentally walks off with sensitive info, or deliberately steals a client list, the results can be truly nightmarish–putting you at the center of a privacy scandal or giving competitors insights they shouldn’t have.

How to wake from this nightmare

Your administrators need the power to:

• Revoke access to corporate email, WiFi and VPN networks as soon as anyone leaves the company

• Remove apps and content from devices instantly

• Customize privacy policies

You’ll also want to use Mobile Content Management solutions to create ‘secure workspaces’ –dividing devices into work areas and personal areas – to ensure personal and corporate data stay separate, and separately manageable.

The Lost and Found: How can you stop lost devices meaning lost data?

We’ve all read stories in the newspaper about government officials leaving important devices or documents on trains or in taxis. Before you judge, ask yourself this: have you ever accidentally left your phone somewhere?

If you haven’t, we guarantee you can think of someone who has. Lost devices are an inevitable consequence of major trends like "Bring Your Own Device" (BYOD).

But the concern with lost devices is actually two-fold. For one thing, it’s the content on the device. But it’s also the content that device can grant access to, that carries the greatest threat.

So, what can you do to stop a lost device meaning lost data?

How to wake from this nightmare

If you’re going to escape this nightmare, the ability to remotely access and remove apps and content from a device is crucial. That way, vital data can be permanently secured, even if the device is gone forever.

Once again, you’ll also want to use mobile device management to lock or wipe a device instantly and secure workspaces, to keep sensitive corporate data separate –and encrypted.

The Hacker: There are bad people out there. How do you defend yourself?

Hackers cost the American economy an estimated $100 billion a year –and you may be surprised to know small businesses suffer as much as corporate giants.

We’re used to defending our servers behind firewalls, but in mobile devices hackers now have a new target: one that’s fresh enough to be under-protected, and prevalent enough to pose a genuine threat to your organization.

So, how can you be sure the apps your people have on their devices aren’t giving hackers a back door to your systems?

How to wake from this nightmare

Screen all apps before you let your people use them–banning them entirely, or placing restrictions on use.

Mobile application management (MAM) tools are available to support exactly this process (sometimes called App Reputation Scanning). They’ll let you:

• Identify common risks (such as access to privacy settings, insecure network connections, malicious code and more)

• ‘Wrap’ at-risk applications–be they internal or third-party– in an extra level of security and policy (imagine literally putting a wrapper around an app, that limits how it can be used)

You’ll also want the development tools to build super-secure apps of your own–and you could even create a personalized, secure enterprise app store to ensure hackable applications stay utterly off the menu.

The Over-sharer: Why backing up everything could be a big mistake

Your people’s mobile devices contain a lot of things–pictures of family, live sports scores, social media timelines and other even more, shall we say, ‘private’ content.

If your people want to use these devices for work, then the liability for what’s on them becomes yours. Not an ideal situation, as we’re sure you can imagine.

You’re not there to babysit your people, and tell them what they can and can’t look at, and you certainly don’t want to be backing up private content–or illegal content–onto your company servers.

How to wake from this nightmare

In this scenario, secure workspaces (‘containers’) really come into their own. You need to be able to separate commercial and personal data on a device, ensuring corporate resources stay secure and individual privacy is maintained.

So, containerize that content. Divide the device into two parts: one for company use and one for whatever is appropriate outside of work.

You can also turn to our old friend app wrapping. Simply wrap on an app by app basis, restricting the ability to copy, re-save and share the content it contains.

End the nightmares. Wake Up to the Facts.

Mobile is great for business. It brings levels of flexibility and productivity to your workforce that wouldn’t have been possible a decade ago. But, with this new power, comes a new set of risks.

These nightmares are the stuff or reality. They happen to companies of all sizes in all industries every day.

But there’s no reason they should. Managing these risks and minimizing exposure to outside threats really isn’t rocket science.

It just requires a robust, flexible and powerful solution that covers MDM, MAM, and content management concerns.

We're Sprint Business and we help companies like yours tackle their mobility nightmare so their people can work better together, wherever they are.

Read our slideshare to find out more about the Four Flavors of Mobile Security and Management