Beyond MDM: what today’s enterprise needs to answer mobile security threats

Table of Contents

  1. Summary
  2. MDM: early mobile protection
  3. Growth of mobile and BYOD outpace security
  4. Demand for incident readiness preparation
  5. Mobility security policy sets the foundation
  6. Planning for mobile security and incident readiness
  7. Key takeaways
  8. About Michael Finneran
  9. About AccessData

1. Summary

As they mobilize and globalize, enterprises face an increasing number of attacks and security incidents, and bring your own device (BYOD) initiatives have brought mobile security to the fore. Still, most organizations focus squarely on device-based prevention, at the expense of measures designed to detect and respond to security incidents. User-driven demand for enterprises to support a wider selection of mobile devices (either company-provided or BYOD) has created the need for new security measures. However, the tools and techniques that are being brought to bear in managing this new environment may not be forward thinking enough to truly prepare for mobile-security incidents.

Organizations must prepare for mobile devices’ inevitable security incidents, such as data leakage, insider threats, and malware. Many have come to rely on mobile device management (MDM) systems as a key element in their protection strategy. However, organizations also need deep and broad visibility across mobile devices combined with the capability to detect security incidents, and most important, the ability to resolve them in a proactive fashion before major damage is done. They must be able to extract all of the valuable data that is required for incident detection and response from all the various mobile devices involved, including volatile data, images, and data hidden within applications.

Key findings:

  • A significant percentage of organizations are taking virtually no steps to ensure that mobile devices with access to corporate data are indeed secure.
  • Even fewer have procedures and plans in place to launch a meaningful response should a security incident involving mobile devices occur.
  • There is also a need to look beyond device data protection and address threats from malicious websites that users might access with their mobile devices.
  • Even the most experienced forensic examiners are challenged in identifying and extracting data from mobile devices, so enterprise will have a long way to go to catch up.
  • Organizations need to expand their security readiness and incident-response plan to incorporate mobile devices, data, and applications in order to gain increased proactive visibility, monitoring, and analysis.

Thumbnail image courtesy of Tashatuvango/Thinkstock.

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