Earlier BYOD, And Now BYON – Enterprises Will Be Under Security Threat For Sure!

A few days back we were talking and discussing about the security issues posed by the concept of Bring Your Own Device (BYOD). While the enterprises just started fighting-back to the security issues caused by the mobility solutions, the march of all new concept Bring Your Own Network (BYON) is making its entry in the enterprises silently, stealthily and totally outside of the management control.

Emergence of SAP enterprise mobility solutions has revolutionized the way enterprises were performing their critical business operations. But the security issues associated with BYOD proved to be a worst nightmare for the enterprises who have adopted it. However, in this post, we are not going to discuss about the security issues caused by the BYOD. But we are going to highlight the security issues posed by the BYON (Bring Your Own Network).

So, how does the BYON poses security challenges within the enterprises???

Almost all the modern Smartphones and tablets can be converted into a wireless hot spot within a few seconds, which will enable them and other wireless devices within a range to be easily connected to the web regardless of the place, whether it's outside the field or at the workplace. From the worker or employees’ point-of-view this makes sense. They may be not allowed to connect their personal devices to the corporate network or may wish to get rid of taking permissions.

Most of the employees are well-aware about the fact that a few of the sites like social media sites, betting sites and download sites are either blocked or have their use monitored. But with the help of their tablet having 3G/4G capabilities, they can get the speed of 12Mpbs to access all the data. But from the enterprise security point-of-view, it would pose security challenges.

However, one should remember that someone is paying a large part of their workplace time pursuing personal interests and presents a large hit for more productivity. These things also tend to endemic in the corporate culture and quite difficult to go back after a very short time. Moreover, such situation also brings a coach and horses via the policies you have created regarding the inappropriate or illegal material being viewed within the enterprise premises or workplace as it can easily bypass any kind of filters or logs created to avoid them.

Moreover, if you don’t have appropriate security measures – in order to prevent their connection to any unauthorized wireless access points and backing them up with the DLP on each and every thing to make sure the files downloaded elsewhere can’t be transferred to any of the computers- there is a huge risk of bridging the enterprise network.

Another big risk that can be critical for the enterprises is that the sensitive or critical business information or data will go another way through the unprotected and unauthorized devices.

Well, the first and the most important thing you have to do is to plan-out a clear and concise policy regarding the usage of the BYON within the enterprise premises. Another thing you can do is to carry out a business risk assessment involving the key risk stakeholders to identify the risks. Ensure you take these two steps as a high priority to prevent the security challenges posed by the Bring Your Own Network.

Do you have more suggestions? Comment below to share your views on this…!

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How Small-Medium Businesses Can Tame Mobility Threats?

With the emergence of Enterprise Mobility Solutions India, the organizations have seen a huge shift in the way they were carrying out their business operations till now. However, according to the survey conducted by the Symantec, the majority of enterprises have reported at least one mobile security threat within the last 12 months.


Of course, mobile device management (MDM) empowers the organizations to have a great control over the mobile devices of the employees working within the organization. But the SMBs (Small-Medium Businesses) who are leveraging from the concept of BYOD (Bring Your Own Device), the technology could be quite complicated to achieving even a small gain.

Apart from the complexities associated with the implementation of the mobile device management (MDM) solutions, synchronizing the employees’ personal devices with the technology results into the pitfalls for the companies, specifically the small companies. At this moment, almost 61% of the small & mid-sized organizations are allowing its employees to bring their own devices within the enterprise premises. However, according to the IT community & Service Firm – Spiceworks, this number is going to reach by 70% at the end of this year.

Most of the SMBs doesn’t have any robust solution to track their employees’ mobile devices, which at the end poses severe mobile security threats. But it is possible for the SMBs to tackle such mobile threats without even adding complexity. In this post, we’ll see how by simply following a few basic things can help them tame mobility threats on the go!

First and most important thing is that SMBs will have to accept the truth – “They’re having a problem”. Almost 80% of the employees are using their own devices within the enterprise premises. However, business managers are denying the facts. But they should start accepting the fact that employees are using the mobile devices and should plan a strategy to keep their business secure. Moreover, the managers and executives will have to brainstorm about a robust plan to cope up the influx of the new devices.

It is very essential to bring the right kind of person to the table in order to take the right decision based on the types of information being accessed through the devices.

Educate the employees about the security concerns associated with the enterprise mobility solutions. It is must that you educate the workers using their personal devices to access the business information about the mobile security concerns. It is not easy to convince the employees to lock their phones. Organizations should not allow users to bring jailbroken devices within the enterprise network. Moreover, they should ask employees to use more secure applications when it comes to tackle the business data.

Last but not the least, the companies should impose restrictions on the devices to get access to the internal network. It becomes mandatory for the enterprises to force employees use a separate network. For this, the company can create a virtual LAN or guest network, which ensure that the internal network is intact from the access by employees through their personal devices.

Are you planning for the enterprise mobility solutions India? Ensure that you follow a few basic rules discussed here to tame the mobile security threats. Do you have more suggestions? Share it with us by commenting below…!

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The Concept Of BYOD For mLearing Providers – The Challenges & Opportunities

With the concept of enterprise Mobility in India, many organizations are considering the mobile devices as their learning delivery media of choice. Well, going with the wind is not a bad idea, but such preferences are impeded by the various budget constraints, specifically providing costly technologies and mobile devices.

This is the reason why the concept of BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) is rapidly emerging as one of the cost-effective alternatives for the enterprises or organizations willing to embrace a mLearning approach without even providing the devices. But in reality, still there many organizations who feel safe being away from the concept of Bring Your Own Device (BYOD).

As more ‘n’ more organizations are increasingly looking towards the mobile devices as a learning delivery channel, it has become imperative to highlight both the most commonly know challenges and the future opportunities associated with the concept of delivering learning through the employee’s personal mobile device.

Let’s have a look at the major concerns:

Do you think one-size-fits-for-all will work?

Well, enterprises and mLearning service providers are nailing their heads with the thought of developing a single system to support almost every type of issues arising on the tons of different mobile devices having different configurations and features. Moreover, starting from the support for enterprise applications to the software installation quirks, there are tons of other issues that you will have to face.

Poor compatibility between the different mobile operating systems is one of the major challenge that is being sited by the organizations. With such a huge number of new devices in the legacy systems, integration issue is quite valid. Mobile learning solution or service providers will have to cope up with such fragmentation issues. 

However, if the organization or users won’t find the system useful and reliable, they will simply discard it on the go. After this, it would be quite impossible to regain their trust back. Therefore, an effective communication between the IT department of an organization and the mLearning service provider is essential in order to implement the mLearning solutions or systems successfully. And this becomes more important when you are dealing with the BYOD environment.

Loss of data and security is another major concern. Both the data security and data loss are always a prime concern for the enterprises when they are planning to implement BYOD. Most of the organizations are concerned about how much control they would have on their employees’ personal devices. Moreover, they are also worried about the security issues or vulnerabilities caused due to the mobile devices.

Now what are the opportunities? Well, one of the biggest opportunity that organizations or corporate world can leverage is the technological advancement taking place every now and than in the consumer products. Consumer market tends to take big leaps and moves far ahead from the corporate market. Moreover, one should not overlook the strong bond of users with the mobile devices and technology. 

The concept of BYOD will open new doors of opportunity for the mLearning solutions and service providers to serve to the SME’s training requirements. Most of the small or mid-sized enterprises have very limited budget to offer the training material and all. BYOD and the mLearning will boast such SMEs by reducing the cost overhead.

So, BYOD and mLearning brings a great opportunity for the learning service providers to leverage from them while reducing the other issues. However, they will have to learn to deal with the concerns discussed above. What’s your view on this? Do you really think BYOD can bring ease of training or learning?

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Enterprise Mobility Helps Save Money – If You’re Thinking The Same, Think Over It Again!

With the concept of BYOD (Bring Your Own Device), more ‘n’ more employees are bringing their own personal devices like Smartphones, Tablets and other Android devices instead of using the ones offered by the organization. Evolution of enterprise mobility in India has transformed the way organizations were carrying their business operations. While the CIOs of the organizations thinks that BYOD helps them saving costs as they won’t have to buy specific devices for the employees. But it is not always a truth.

According to the recent survey, the enterprises that simply say BYOD is all about productivity and have completely overlooked the cost structure are playing with a blank check, which has created a huge question mark on the current trend of enterprise mobility. Enterprise mobility was supposed to help CIOs overcoming the conventional hardware-buying cycle or at least reduce the cost. For some of the popular technology giants, the concept of BYOD costs more than the long run than the company-owned devices.

So where is actually all the money is going? In this post we’ll try to take a look at a few of the hidden things that actually consumes more money.

-          Expense Reports

Most of the organizations spend an average of $80 for the company-owned mobile devices, or $10 more than the concept of BYOD. Initially, you may feel that the enterprise mobility solutions helps you save a lot money, right? Well, unfortunately that is not a truth. You will have to take a look at the hidden cost of reimbursing the BYOD workers as the employee will put a monthly expense report for his/her personal wireless device’s bill.

Moreover, preparing a single report will cost at least $18 to process, says Aberdeen, which at the end drag the cost of the BYOD mobile device bill around $90/month. Sometimes, employees often expense their entire wireless bill rather than the itemized bill as it would be almost impossible for the organizations to filter their personal and professional usage.

-          Security, management, data loss and more

With the concept of Bring Your Own Device, the IT person within an organization will have to input every device into a system, punching the phone number, IMEIs and other employee details manually. It could be a major pain point for the organizations to deal with the BYOD on an ongoing basis.

Also, there is a huge amount of costs involved in security and compliance with the BYOD. CIOs of the organizations will have to invest in a multi-platform mobile device management solutions and other softwares.

-          Help desk support

You will have to invest in the help desk support as well. With the BYOD, IT departments are unable to control the actions of the carriers or the devices. However, they are still responsible to support the BYOD employees without getting any additional resources. Moreover, the employees can easily fix the problems faced within their wireless devices. So, the organizations will have to invest in the help desk support.

-        Multi-platform & multi-department

It is a fact that the concept BYOD brings more platforms to develop          applications for and support. Opting for the enterprise mobility may lead your organization to develop a dedicated app for the iPhone or iPad devices. Developing an internal app can drastically rise with the bring your own device concept. Moreover, it requires multi-department support as well. So, the company will have to invest in the multi-department communication process to handle the issues created in BYOD.

After going through the above details, do you still think that enterprise mobility will help you save a lot of cost? Share your views on this!

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Enterprise Mobility Security Threats Are Real & Growing Rapidly With Each Passing Day

The concept of BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) has fuelled the usage of mobile devices, cloud storage repositories, various kinds of data types, and, obviously, data breaches by the malicious employees within the enterprises. According to the recent survey, the number of cases in which mobile devices are the means of stealing the data is almost double compared to that of the last year.

While there are tons of articles and posts are being written about the BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) and mobile security, you will find a very rare of them actually focusing on the reality of the security threats growing with each passing day. Moreover, there has been a lot of talk about the enterprise mobility security or threats. But is it really a truth or just big hype created by the users and experts? In this blog post, we’ll try to find out the truth and we will see how it is growing with each passing day.

Well, in reality based on the network, the threats can be divided into either by the external vector or the internal vector. The external vector is usually the hackers or cyber crooks who come straight away from the overseas in order to penetrate the network. Most of them continue to come through the traditional avenues and not necessarily from the concept of BYOD (Bring Your Own Device).

However, enterprise mobility policies have increased the risk of internal threats to the enterprises leveraging from the concept of BYOD. Most probably any malicious employee within an enterprise is a big threat to the security as they have multiple ways of connecting to the network and move the information around.

So, the security threat, in terms of the internal vector, is already present and big enough to make or break the enterprise mobility. Moreover, the businesses have seen a great rise in the BYOD data breaches, specifically in the forensics are around employment matters. There are many cases where employees within the organizations have stolen the information or intellectual properties of the enterprise. In such scenarios, the concept of BYOD comes straight into the scrutiny. Instead of just looking at the server, email or the computer, now the enterprises have to consider the smartphone devices, iCloud or Dropbox account, or Gmail for the security breach.

Have you noticed any kind of security breach through the concept of BYOD?

One of the most common ways BYOD policies may cause data security and breaches is due to the cross-pollination of passwords. Most of the time employee uses the same password as they use in their home systems or devices. They are mostly logging from the home into the corporate network through the similar username and password. However, chances of a security breach due this are very less.

Do you think the concept of BYOD will be affected by the downfall?

If organizations turn a blind eye towards mobile devices, they are going to penetrate the workplace anyway. You are unable to control each and every action. But you should be futuristic for using the concept of enterprise mobility in your organization to overcome the rising security threats...!

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