After two years of remote working and a generally lukewarm response from employees to their employers’ overtures to return to the workplace it seems that hybrid working is here to stay.
The normalisation of this way of working – once the sole preserve of those with formally agreed flexible working arrangements – is just a further diversification of the workplace that last saw a radical shift with the introduction of the smart phone.
Over time, the use of smart phones to actually do business (rather than distract people from doing it) has proliferated to such an extent that mobile device management (MDM) has become an essential weapon for IT teams in winning the cyber security war.
But challenging though the corporate IT landscape has become due to the transition of smart phones to essential business tools, it was at least easier to manage in a pre-lockdown world when the majority of workers were permanently located in offices where mobile use could be more closely supervised.
Remote working has blown that out of the water, with IT security now having to contend with heterogeneous working practices that call for remote solutions when it comes to MDM.
Mobile security is under further pressure from increasing demands for businesses to be truly agile – responding to customers and clients on a 24/7 basis, and processing business tasks and functions via mobile devices at similarly non-specific times.
That need for agility has been magnified by the pandemic as many businesses learned the acute need to be able to quickly exploit a reducing number of revenue opportunities.
In our changing world, profitability relies heavily on the ability to adapt to unforeseen circumstances, constantly shifting sands of information, and rapidly evolving incoming data, and the smartphone is the ultimate adaptable tool, specifically designed with that job in mind.
Managing your devices
Mobile devices pose significant security challenges when they aren’t managed strategically and that’s where MDM is a critical layer of protection that businesses ignore at their peril.
At YCG we provide MDM to a great many clients, and we have seen an increasing need for IT managers to be able to meet the challenge of designing MDM solutions that fit the needs of their business.
Those challenges are exponentially greater for businesses that apply bring your own device (BYOD) policies, where employees use their personal device for work, and are compensated through expenses for doing so.
As we have discussed previously, the BYOD approach brings with it a very particular set of vulnerabilities that IT security teams are ill-equipped – and often unable – to deal with.
Workers using their own devices will routinely use applications of that have questionable security layers behind them – and a digital ecosystem in which insecure personal apps mix with potentially commercially sensitive work data is a recipe for disaster.
Company-issued devices make security management easier through cloud-based MDM that can remotely restrict access to non-approved apps, enforce OS updates, and disable devices when they are lost or stolen.
This means that even in the most diverse work environments, where the location of individual devices is unknown, a higher degree of remote authority is maintained.
At YCG we have expertise in enrolling and managing MDM on behalf of our clients and can advise on best practice. If you have a large number of devices being operated on a remote basis, then it might be time to review your MDM capability.
If you’d like to find out more about how we can help you to achieve that, please get in touch. We’d love to hear from you.
