Enterprise Mobility Solutions and BYOD: Questions to Ask

Date posted: 2nd June 2015

Bring your own device (BYOD) a key element of Enterprise Mobility Solutions allows your employees to use their personal devices for company applications. This may include email, CRM and document sharing systems. This benefits the enterprise due to cost savings on hardware and benefits employees as one device fulfills multiple use cases.

Historically allowing third party devices onto a corporate network has been a strict no-go for traditional IT departments. But with the migration to BYOD and Enterprise Mobility Solutions new security and access policies are required.

Recently, noted security expert David Strom posted on Tech Target the 6 questions to ask before implementing a BYOD policy.

The “Six Questions To Ask Security Providers” from Tech Target

1. Is all traffic encrypted between mobile devices and your corporate network? Some security apps use SSL connections, and some provide their own encryption methods. Other tools don’t encrypt any data that is sent over the Internet at all. This functionality also varies by device type: many Android devices don’t have device-level encryption. And some BYOD tools do a better job of managing the encryption certificates than others, too.
2. Are files that are viewed on the mobile device ever stored on the device itself? With some mobile devices, once a remote session ends, all traces of the document are removed from the tablet’s memory and storage. With others,there can be some residue, or the file itself could be accessed by an app that you have already downloaded to your device.
3. Does a document remain under the control of the app, so you can prevent it from being exported outside the app? Some technologies use containers or application wrappers to separate enterprise data and files from other mobile apps. The stricter the control you have, the more secure your files will be.
4. Can you remotely wipe all traces of the document or history from the employee-owned device, or disable the device entirely if it’s lost or stolen? One often-touted feature of many network security tools is the ability to remotely wipe a phone if it is compromised, or at least terminate any Internet access from the device. But how this is implemented, and what level of IT involvement is needed (such as a panic call into your help desk) to turn off a device differs among the various tools.
5. Can you disable employee-owned device peripherals through policies?Some products can turn off broadband data connections and force Wi-Fi to save on cellular data usage, or disable a camera or Bluetooth radio under certain circumstances or for particular applications.
6. Does the BYOD or a single-sign on product integrate with two factor authentication tools? Some tools support third-party multifactor authentication for increased security. For instance, AirWatch Enterprise Mobility Management works with F-Secure’s authentication product. Others, such as IBM’s Endpoint Manager, offer no second factor support.

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