Hot off the press Apple is teaming up with IBM for an Enterprise push. This article speaks more like a business presentation report with the buzzword “verticals” mentioned over and over rather than providing insight into a true product that can benefit the Enterprise. The press release directly from IBM reads better than TechCrunch in this case. This quite ironic partnership between Apple and IBM may attempt to overpower the BYOD industry that built up trying to make executives happy with their phones.
BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) largely came about because businesses were only willing to purchase certain types of phones for only some of their employees. Blackberry was the de facto standard due to Blackberry Enterprise Server and built-in controls that enabled the business to control and protect what happened on the device. Not content to be living without all the latest features, or carrying two phones, or without a phone capable of accessing their business email, executives pushed towards business functionality on Apple and Android. Typically these trends started at the top of businesses where executives insisted on the ability, and overrode the security concerns. Once management tools and apps for Apple and Android were in place, BYOD worked its way down in the organization and became a concern for IT everywhere. Unlike Blackberry, which was built for the Enterprise, Apple and Android enterprise solutions have always been add-ons. This partnership with Apple, if it is successful, may more smartly align the management and control that businesses desire with an integrated Apple solution.
Regardless of how this may or may not change the industry in the future, we cannot ignore the problems of today. It is tiring to see the term BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) pile up in email, twitter, and other advertising headlines. The reason it continues to remain such a hot topic is because of the persistent threat it poses to business and how challenging it still can be to mitigate that threat. Whether or not you have a policy which forbids BYOD, if you have no mechanism in place to prevent or detect violation then you likely have employees or 3rd party individuals taking advantage. The same applies if you have authorized company owned mobile use in your business. You need to have mechanisms in place to protect the business from these mobile devices, to protect the devices themselves from outside threats, and from each other. This becomes even more critical if employee’s personally owned devices might contain sensitive company information in the emails they hold, or the access they have to your network.
To make matters worse, mobile threats are not only limited to devices traditionally considered mobile such as laptops and smart phones. Mobile threats include any device which can be moved between your business and the outside world such as portable or miniature computers, USB devices, and software. These threats can cause diverse problems such as but not limited to data loss, network performance issues, legal troubles with unlicensed software or data, loss of employee productivity, or unprofessionalism in the form of office politics played out on Facebook.
Many businesses may be surprised to learn that they are more vulnerable to these threats than they thought. A case study for a university where internal and external threats are particularly intense describes the process the university went through, first thinking all was well, and then discovering massive vulnerabilities and compromises. While there are typically a wide variety of internal and external threats in any network implementation, firewall solutions exist so that mobile, or guest access, can be easily segregated into their own zones, allowing only business related traffic to traverse from a guest network to the protected network. A major benefit is that a single well implemented solution can be configured to protect against these diverse threats simultaneously.
The concept of BYOD protection should not simply be limited to mobile phones. It should be expanded to BYOSoftware, BYOPersonalComputer, BYOWiFi, and a number of other similar threats. The benefit of an integrated solution is that it can cover and help you detect all of these variations with network segregation and application level inspection of traffic. In case studies, a mix of BYOD, server compromises, malicious, and abusive software were able to be both detected and ultimately prevented with the same solution all while reducing labor effort. That is powerful.
Also critical to a comprehensive security policy surrounding mobile threats is mobile device management, malware detection, and encrypted data communication. These solutions include apps for iPhone or Android, and software for Windows, Mac, or Linux computer. These solutions would be recommended for employee or company owned mobile or extranet device that itself is a target for attack while inside or outside the network perimeter.
How is your enterprise BYOD strategy shaping up? Chi can help you with these challenges. We want to learn about your business and your needs by engaging your IT staff, collecting data as we go that we will analyze to help you work towards the right solution for your business. We will present recommendations to you and then continue to nurture the relationship so that product is delivered, correctly implemented, and long-term support is provided.
Paul Comfort
Senior Systems Engineer
Chi Corporation
@PCComf
440-498-2300
