Broadening the Scope of Mobile Security

Most enterprises, when addressing mobile security, focus on securing applications, such as the devices' operating systems, or preventing the installation of malware. But the cybersecurity experts at the National Institute of Standards and Technology say organizations should take a much broader approach to ensuring mobile security.

Referring to the need to address the risks posed by cellular networks and other elements of the mobile infrastructure, NIST Cybersecurity Engineer Joshua Franklin says: "There is this whole other side of a mobile device that has its own complex hardware, firmware, software and network protocols that need to be addressed." Franklin co-authored the recently released draft report, Assessing Threats to Mobile Devices & Infrastructure: the Mobile Threat Catalogue.

Can IT keep up with big data?

Though IT and its functions and responsibilities have changed over the years, there's one area that remains consistent: IT primarily focuses on major enterprise applications and on large machines—whether they are mainframes or super servers.

When IT deals with big data, the primary arena for it is, once again, large servers that are parallel processing in a Hadoop environment. Thankfully for the company at large, IT also focuses on reliability, security, governance, failover, and performance of data and apps—because if it didn't, there would be nobody else internally to do the job that is required. Within this environment, IT's job is most heavily focused on the structured transactions that come in daily from order, manufacturing, purchasing, service, and administrative systems that keep the enterprise running. In this environment, analytics, unstructured data and smaller servers in end user departments are still secondary.

Getting Serious About Mobile Security

Technologies like biometric authentication and DLP are making enterprise mobility more secure. Are mobile UC and mobile-first team collaboration apps keeping pace?

One of my longtime favorite observations about UC and mobility is that everyone in the UC space talks about mobility, but nobody in the mobile business talks about UC. The focus there instead is on security, which happens to be an area of ongoing concern among those of us watching activities around mobile UC and the rise of mobile-first team collaboration apps.

It might seem that the mobile security story broke onto the scene with the advent of BYOD and the trend of allowing personally owned devices to access corporate systems. This trend, however, only intensified what was already a serious information security concern. On top of traditional worries, an organization's attack surface increased exponentially as it rolled out BYOD and had corporate data residing on so many easy to lose or steal devices. Further, as BYOD took off, the only platform capable of delivering enterprise-grade security was BlackBerry, and no one was bringing his or her own BlackBerry.

Companies must embrace BYOD strategically

Research shows that the Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) trend is not only here to stay, but will, in fact, grow in significance in next few years. Human Capital Management and HR experts at CRS Technologies believe that businesses ought to conduct a thorough cost and needs analysis before applying a strategy.

The company refers to Gartner studies on this evolving trend, specifically the prediction that almost four in ten (40%) organisations will rely exclusively on BYOD by 2016.

“Meaning they will no longer provide devices to employees. Additionally, eighty five percent of businesses will have some kind of BYOD program in place by 2020,” says James McKerrell, CEO of CRS Technologies.

Against this background of fast growing significance and relevance to the market, it is to be expected that companies will be eager to formulate and apply a BYOD strategy as a matter of urgency.

But it is more advisable for business decision makers to take a step back, consider a number of factors and measure these against core business requirements – irrespective of how attractive the proposition to reduce company investment in devices and lower costs is to financial directors, says McKerrell.

Be wary
Key considerations include data privacy and security, compatibility, and tech leasing. As McKerrell explains if employees are allowed to use their own mobile devices at work there is a need to implement a robust BYOD security policy.

“This policy should clearly state the company’s position and governance policy to ensure network security is not breached. Privacy can be compromised on both sides. Just one stolen phone can send an entire organisation into crisis. Things like remote deletion of data and access points come to the fore,” he says.

Here’s why LTE networks are about to become much more useful

There’s more to LTE than just speeding up communications between mobile devices, and its increasingly faster speeds – now at 150 Mpbs and expected to hit 600 Mpbs by 2018 – is beginning to benefit enterprise networks.

In a recent webinar, 451 Research analyst Christian Renaud noted that many conference attendees are eschewing the free WiFi offered at event facilities in favor of tethering to an LTE network because it’s faster.

“It’s getting far faster and more ubiquitous,” he said. At this rate, the speed of wireless connections will begin to exceed the speed of wired connections in the next few years.

In addition, the worldwide footprint has grown to 422 LTE networks in 143 countries, and all but 12 countries globally have committed to LTE networks, said Renaud. This footprint is now poised to become a platform for innovation and growth in applications as cloud computing, mobility in the workforce, the Internet of Things (IoT) and security have an impact on networks, he said.

Industrial IoT is now becoming a reality, said Renaud, and it means operational technology that historically wasn’t connected to the network is going to be, and it’s going to add further complexity to enterprise networks. Data center and WAN congestion is increasing pressure to offload non-core applications to the cloud, he said, while existing MPLS and private WANs are too “brittle” and interfering with the ability to quickly respond to new applications and services.


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