Mobile Security: Employee Training & Mobile Device Management

As workplace mobility becomes both more widespread and more accepted, the importance of employee awareness of mobile security increases. To be effective, mobility, the ability of your employees to carry on their workplace duties outside the office, must be properly managed to be secure. Unfortunately, this is not always the case. There are more and more cases of valuable and sensitive data being compromised, either from lost or stolen devices, from improper downloading of apps available online, or simply failing to practice effective password procedures.

The reality is that mobile security is not high on the radar of many workers. It may also surprise you to know that the most technologically sophisticated generation, the millennials, are also those most likely to engage in risky behavior. In a study conducted not long ago, it was discovered that a full 60% of millennial workers regularly share both their work and their devices with others, and 20% don’t even use password protection on their devices, whether company supplied or their own that they use for work. In fact, a good percentage of them intentionally don’t use protection to make it easier to share their devices.

It is not that the millennial generation is not concerned about security. They are. But almost 90% assumed that the IT departments of the companies they work for are keeping their devices, company data, and themselves safe and secure. They are expecting that if a behavior is unsafe, they will be restricted from engaging in it and, therefore, anything they are able to do is safe. As a managed IT service provider, we can tell you that one of the first orders of business when we are engaged by a new client is employee training. The fact is that the weakest link in network security is the untrained employee who unwittingly violates security protocols and opens the entire company network to cyber attack.

But is employee training enough? As important as training is, we also know that managing the devices used by a company’s employees is just as important, and as the use of personally owned laptops, smartphones and tablets increases, the task becomes ever more daunting. It’s hard enough to manage company owned devices, but adding employee owned devices used for company business magnifies the situation.

So the question is: how can a small to mid-sized business (SMB) best handle these mobile security concerns? This is a project that the IT department of a typical SMB (if there is an actual IT department) can find overwhelming. From a dollars and cents perspective, adding to the cost of the IT personnel are the cost of servers, licenses and maintenance.

We believe that a much better solution is the use of a cloud-based mobile device management system (MDM), with the provider, such as a managed IT service company, handling all the background IT management functions. The SMB realizes the same benefits as an enterprise system, such as updating all devices in a single push, instead of an IT team member having to update each device individually. Built-in security that assures appropriate password creation will also be part of the package, and you will have the ability, if you choose, to add encryption, plus you can track all the devices connected to your system, greatly eliminating the risk of unauthorized devices undetected devices operating on your network.

Simply put, we believe mobile device management is one of the most important elements of a secure IT network.

DynaSis is an Atlanta IT services and cloud computing provider for small and mid-sized businesses. All of our solutions focus on helping companies achieve the three fundamental IT necessities of the modern business—availability, security and mobility. We specialize in on-demand and on-premise managed IT services, managed cloud infrastructure, desktops and backups, and professional hardware and equipment installation. For more information about DynaSis’ IT support and services, visit www.dynasis.com.