How Does Your Business Identify Risky Mobile Apps?

As you are no doubt aware, BYOD, or Bring Your Own Device, is taking the business world by storm. This forces employers and IT departments alike to consider the security ramifications of letting employees use their personal devices in the workplace. What’s the security situation of your BYOD policy look like?

While there is a lot of concern over the security of mobile devices and applications associated with BYOD, it certainly still has its merits. Letting employees use their own personal devices can improve morale and significantly improve productivity, since workers might find the ability to work after-hours encouraging. However, all good things have some stipulations, and BYOD is no different. Business owners that take advantage of BYOD must consider the security risks in order to achieve the most productivity with minimal chance of a data breach.

According to a recent study by Flexera and IDC, even businesses that have a BYOD policy aren’t entirely certain how to protect their infrastructure from the various threats unique to BYOD, and how to manage the risk of these elements.

• 71 percent of enterprises will have a BYOD policy put into place within the next two years. Therefore, it’s safe to say that it’s a growing trend that will quickly overtake your industry, if it hasn’t already.
• 69 percent of enterprises will put security measures into place to block risky application behavior within the next two years.
• 71 percent of enterprises claim that security is at the top of their priority list for BYOD.

While plenty of businesses have every intention of putting a BYOD policy security risk management protocol into place, this is very different from having one actually established.

• 55 percent of enterprises don’t have a set-in-stone list of applications that they consider risky for their business.
• 61 percent of enterprises don’t know what type of application behaviors they should deem risky.
• 16 percent of enterprises report that their current BYOD policies result in a lower level of application risk.

As previously mentioned, while most businesses have plans to integrate a BYOD risk management policy, they don’t really know how to handle it. This is alarming news, especially considering how simple it is to let a security issue into your network from an employee device.

Handling BYOD is simple and easy to manage with XFER’s mobile device management solution. Included is a comprehensive mobile security solution designed to keep threats at bay, as well as the ability to whitelist and blacklist certain applications. This keeps them from gathering information that might be sensitive or confidential.

For more information about XFER’s mobile device management solution, give us a call at 734-927-6666 / 800-GET-XFER today.