Want happy employees? It’s more than the occasional catered office lunch. It’s providing an environment where employees can be productive, collaborate with colleagues and find creative ways to power through their to-do lists. Mobile devices play a primary role in this movement, but so have the widespread adoption of public and private cloud applications, which have provided workers access to their files, and each other, anywhere, anytime and from any device.
News of massive hacking attacks that expose sensitive company data and compromise customer account information has businesses of all sizes taking a closer look at their data security practices.
Last month, I wrote an article on the Emergence of Smartphones as a Key Platform for Security Industry that discussed the growing ubiquity of smartphones within the workplace and the increasing number of mobile apps that have the ability to collect information from its environment such as video streams, audio streams, indoor location and information from other sensors.
Only 45 percent of consumers have changed an online password or PIN code in the past year after learning of data breaches; 15 percent made fewer online purchases on mobile devices; and 28 percent shopped less frequently at a retailer that had suffered a data breach.
Eight months: That’s the average amount of time most IT security breaches go unnoticed. Security enterprises need to establish not only ways to protect themselves from these breaches but ways to uncover them in real-time, before they become major business disruptions. And as Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) and mobility continue to transform the way we do business, many security managers and IT executives are finding that if they don’t initiate a robust security policy, employees are likely to use personal laptops and mobile devices to conduct business anyway.
There is a common plot line that underlies most of the breach stories in the news. Software written by bad guys gets into places on the corporate network where it shouldn’t be. It looks around, finds vulnerable systems, grabs valuable data and transmits it off the network. The term most commonly used to describe this behavior is Advanced Persistent Threat (APT).
BYOD is either a ticking time bomb or IT’s greatest opportunity. Whether you belong to the 40 percent of organizations that have policies or not, I guarantee people are using their own mobile devices at your office.
Companies have encouraged their workforces to be effective regardless of their location or the time of day, making wireless Internet connectivity the latest lifeblood of workforce productivity. These gains have been accomplished primarily by embracing Wi-Fi, which is not without added risk. Cyber spies and criminals have successfully targeted wireless networks for years, which in turn, requires increased vigilance both when deploying Wi-Fi networks and when training our employees to safely use Wi-Fi.
