Best Practices For Securing Enterprise Mobility Program

By Author: Jennifer Lewis
Total Articles: 304
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With the rise of Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) concept, enterprises are facing one very serious problem. Employees working from remote locations like their homes and cyber cafes often download apps to accelerate their speed and productivity. However, the problem is that they are downloading them from various resources, other than those sanctioned by their company's IT section. They keep looking for apps that could finish their work quickly, efficiently and accurately. This is putting corporate network and data security at stake. Moreover, apps developed in-house by the businesses are not as secure as they would be, if developed by experienced app development companies like Copper Mobile. An article published on TechTarget says that businesses lack proper app testing tools hence, their apps are not robust and prone to breakdowns and breaches that directly affects the corporate data. In this write up, we will discuss few security practices that would ensure corporate data security.

Enterprises should look to include security measures right at apps level. Generally, we rely too much on device manufacturer's security settings ...
... for securing our phones. Implementing security options in apps would ensure that users have most security controls in their hands to scale it according to their requirements. Not only business owners, but also smart phone users should take full advantage of all the security features present in their devices.

Don’t just rely on Anti-viruses or Anti-malware – Many mobile apps security analysts advocate using behavioural tools in this pursuit. Most of them are free and easily available at app stores. They will scan your device for installed apps and filter them in a list based on various behaviours shown by them like location tracking, reading the address book, or battery drain. A number of apps available on Apple as well as Android app stores are capable of telling, if your data is encrypted or not or whether the app anonymize you as a user.

This is more like an advice to users of BYOD devices. They should download apps only from the sources recommended by their company's IT section. Moreover, they should rely only on the apps suggested for use by their company. Security analysts say that though this strategy is not 100 percent secure but much more secure than using third-party enterprise apps. Enterprises should restrict synchronization services and look to distribute enterprise specific apps from most trusted sources.

Entrepreneurs should ensure that the apps recommended by them don't save important information like login details, bank details and other confidential data in their cache. They should make sure that users have to feed their login details every time they start using that app.

Further, enterprises should look to acquire technologies for data encryption while in transmission. This encryption is even more crucial in situations where data transits between the corporate server and BYOD devices. Security analysts say that this step is most overlooked among all security measures used for securing enterprise servers.

The IT section of the company should keep a constant track of the traffic coming towards company's server and seeking grant to access it. Tools available for this would help business owners by informing about the incoming traffic and IT managers can use this information to ward off the suspicious users.

Last but not the least, business owners and IT head should apply every modern technology like MDM, MAM and containerization available in the industry. Out of all these, containerization is by far the best, as it keeps enterprise apps and data separate from personal data in the BYOD devices.

The author is associate with one of the top enterprise mobile application development company with its team of iPhone app developer in Dallas Tx has created more than 300 apps for clients. It is one of the leading iPad apps development company.