The Future of Mobile Security

Mobility is the new normal for enterprise users. With forecasts from the GSMA predicting that 80 percent of adults on earth will have a smart phone by 2020 these always connected and always on devices are the most popular personal computer in history.

The use of smart mobile devices (smart phones and tablets running mobile platforms such as Apple iOS and Google Android) in the enterprise is rising rapidly each year. Figures from Citrix indicate that the number of smart mobile devices (SMD) managed in the enterprise increased by 72 percent from 2014 to 2015.

What is surprising, however, is that the enterprise is not fully embracing mobile. Whether it is an employee-owned Android smart phone or a company-issued and controlled iPhone productivity-enhancing enterprise services are still relatively scarce within the enterprise. Outside of email and calendar applications there are relatively few examples of enterprise mobile apps. This differs from the current situation with consumer adoption of mobile where it dominates social, financial services, commerce and entertainment.

So why is? In the latest white paper from Goode Intelligence, the issues facing the enterprise in delivering services to mobile is explored. The report discovers that a mixture of technology constraints, security concerns, compliance to regulation and privacy law are having an impact of restricting mobile enterprise services.

Enterprises do face a challenge in enabling productivity enhancing applications to be available through smart mobile devices but there are ways in which they can combine the convenience of mobility and strong security mechanisms that meet company security policy and comply with regulation. In covering mobile security since 2007 I have learnt that next generation mobile security solutions should have these characteristics:

• They should focus on users
• Support agile multi-factor authentication (MFA) with a choice of authenticator to match the context 
• Be able to provide mobile-based single-sign-on (SSO)
• Must protect the data, both at rest and during transmission
• Be available in a simple to use and unified security offering

I believe that there are very few solutions that offer a unified solution that supports these characteristics and this is why we have seen limited adoption of full-throttled enterprise services for mobile. Often, an organisation will have to mix and match technology solutions to support this vision and this can be expensive and time-consuming. A solution that combines the functionality and features of a next generation mobile security solution is the Sign&go Mobility Center from Ilex International. 

This product provides an integrated security solution to solve the enterprise mobility conundrum; mixing convenience and mobile security in a unified product and provides:

• Strong Multi-Factor Authentication supporting one, two or three factors
• Mobile SSO
• Data Protection in a secure container

Without the combination of these features, organisations will remain limited in what productivity-enhancing mobility solutions they can deliver.