The failure to implement strong strategies, particularly when allowing BYOD is increasing risks.
According to a recent statement released by executives from CA Technologies, enterprises are not putting adequate mobile security policies into place to protect themselves against the many risks that they are generating by allowing employees to bring their own devices.
These BYOD activities are increasing the opportunity for cybercriminals to attack.
This, according to the senior director of product marketing for enterprise mobility at CA Technologies, Arun Bhattacharya. According to Bhattacharya, this failure to come up with appropriate mobile security policies is a direct result of a lack of awareness of the risks that are involved in letting employees use devices for both personal and business activities.
The use of smartphones and tablets at work should be producing far thicker mobile security policies.
Bhattacharya explained that until quite recently, the types of tech that had been available to employees were “limited solely to device management, not end-to-end secure mobility management that takes into consideration the data, applications and integration with enterprise security policies.” However, over the last few years, there has been a rapid acceleration to the sophistication of devices and this requires a considerably greater layer of protection.
Furthermore, it is Bhattacharya’s belief that businesses have become complacent, aside from those that have experienced a “catastrophic security event” that is linked to having had data leaked through a smartphone or tablet.
Kaspersky Lab commissioned a survey that was conducted by B2B International, last year, and determined that among the 2,895 IT professionals that were polled, 65 percent of them said that they knew that there was an increased level of threat to their companies as a result of BYOD. However, despite that fact, only 14 percent of the firms had actually fully implemented regulations and practices that were designed to help to protect themselves from those threats.
The unease expressed by IT workers regarding BYOD may be from a sense of being overwhelmed by the size of the effort that would be involved in the implementation and tracking in mobile security policies. This becomes increasingly true when there are a larger number of employees who bring their personally owned devices.
