Protecting vulnerable mobile endpoints. Manage and secure.

Managing and securing your most vulnerable endpoints, mobile devices, requires more than just an MDM or threat defense solution. Admins need to be able to extend these technologies, embedding them within existing security strategies to ensure a strong, organizational security posture.

This blog explores current mobile security challenges and solutions, the need for mobile-specific measures, an overview of holistic endpoint protection and best practices for mobile security policy implementation, such as:

• An overview of holistic endpoint security strategies
• Gaining insight into current mobile security challenges and solutions
• The importance of mobile-specific security measures
• And best practices for mobile security policy implementation

State of mobile security

Mobile devices enable organizations to implement efficient operations across business functions. With their usability, portability and ability to access apps and resources anywhere, mobile devices let end users – like frontline and corporate teams – function as a connected workforce. But greater connection within workforces could lead to security implications like:

• unauthorized access to corporate data
• leaking end-user privacy information
• lack of protection parity across platforms
• difficulty assessing and maintaining compliance

Each of these represents greater challenges to mobile security – spanning evolving risk to endpoints, users, business and personal data, and impacting the organization’s overall security posture.

The enterprise landscape

Historically, organizations chose to align business needs with a single platform. This helped to simplify management while addressing the unique needs of the company. While working within a homogenous environment reduces some of the challenges relating to IT and Security processes, mobile devices combined with distributed workforces have elevated the often-viewed consumer-oriented devices as critical business tools, essential to supporting business operations from anywhere in the world.

This creates a new management paradigm for organizations that have relied on maintaining just one platform. Instead, enterprise IT and Security teams now find themselves at odds, with more traditional tools providing limited to no support for mobile OS platforms or new features and functionality. This is risk that impacts everything from user productivity to the organization’s ability to protect corporate smartphones and safeguard users from bad actors and evolving threats affecting the integrity of their sensitive data.

What are some of the contributing factors impacting mobile security?

• Fragmentation among supported versions within each OS
• Lack of uniform platform support leads to delays in deploying updates
• Supported vs. unsupported feature sets in MDM solutions
• Ability to routinely assess and verify device telemetry
• Limitations to policy-based enforcement of compliance requirements
• Dissonance between implementing and enforcing protections across the infrastructure

Security parity across ownership models

Organizations use various mobile device ownership models, such as shared or 1:1 devices for frontline employees (e.g., nurses or retail associates) and COPE or BYOD programs for corporate staff. Because of varying needs, device settings are often tailored to suit each model and use case.

Regardless of the model or use case, mobile devices are prime targets for cyber threats. This adds degrees of challenges when developing security processes that both empower user productivity in the field while maintaining a baseline security posture across the infrastructure.

Some common examples

In environments like hospitals or retail, shared devices are commonly used by frontline employees to help streamline their daily tasks. These devices are frequently handled by multiple users throughout the day, increasing the risk of security breaches due to inconsistent access controls. Even when devices are locked down, weak protocols, such as inadequate authentication or poor session management, can expose sensitive data to unauthorized access.

Devices used by high-level executives like directors or VPs, for instance, are often the focus of more sophisticated attacks due to the sensitive organizational communications and data they hold. Mobile devices in the field or on the factory floor are also at risk, as they frequently interact with external networks, raising concerns about network security, data leakage and device loss.

Convergence and compliance

Speaking of compliance, the ability to actively monitor devices, assess risk in real-time and verify any health issues, while following up in quickly with mitigation workflows, is overshadowed by a critical failure that is witnessed when it comes to mobile security: balance.

More specifically in this instance, balance refers to the concepts of management and security. Often, this is incorrectly framed as a tug-of-war between IT and Security teams. But the reality is that relying solely on an MDM solution to pull double duty falls short of providing layered protections. Conversely, organizations that rely on users' personal devices to access business resources, with best practice standards such as:

• Choose a long, complex password
• Never connect to public hotspots
• Follow security hygiene practices for communications
  (i.e., don’t open unsolicited attachments, never click on a link or share your password)
• Install comprehensive threat defense
• Encrypt data using volume encryption

without the ability to enforce baselines through policy-based compliance measures, lack the necessary insight for effective, yet flexible management processes that adapt to the evolving threat landscape.

In other words, ask yourself this: how can organizations verify that endpoints are secure and therefore compliant without device management? Conversely, how can organizations prove risk is being managed properly without endpoint security?

Hence, why balance is such a crucial concept to get just right. It reduces the risk of devices being over-protected (and subsequently unable to be used for work due to subpar user experiences) or under-managed (insufficient or ineffective mobile security that jeopardizes valuable assets and company resources).

Unlock the possibilities of mobile at work

With Jamf for Mobile, organizations get all the capabilities needed to unlock mobile's power at work – letting mobility teams meet security needs and enforce compliance requirements – while upholding the user experience. With key capabilities to help plan, deploy and scale device workflows, we enable teams to:

• Extend workflows with secure access to critical applications anywhere employees work
• Provide mobility and security teams visibility and control to protect devices while preserving native mobile experiences
• Enable 1:1 device assignments and shared device use cases in addition to sanctioned and BYO device models with support parity
• Establish and enforce baselines that are compliant with organizational and regulatory frameworks

Summary

We help organizations transform the way employees work, by transforming what mobile devices can do, with a solution that prioritizes the user experience, integrates existing IT systems in place and extends business workflows, transforming mobility at work.

For a deeper look at the State of Mobile Security, including:

• Mobility drivers and how they fit within enterprise deployment plans
• Rising concerns, risk vectors and the modern threat landscape
• Holistic approaches to bridge the gaps between multiple platforms
• Adhering to compliance requirements for regulated and non-regulated industries
• The keys to developing a unified management + security strategy

We invite you to review our technical paper: Manage and secure your most vulnerable endpoints: mobile devices, to discover a future where every device enjoys uncompromised protection without the need for trade-offs. This vision represents the ultimate goal for organizations and stakeholders: to support business operations with endpoints that are efficiently managed and enterprise secure.