As businesses prepare themselves for the inevitability of business transformation through mobility, BYOD still stands as the big elephant in the room. While 75 percent of organizations allow employee-owned devices on the network, just 9 percent of them are fully aware of how, when and whose devices are accessing their networks throughout the workday. And when organizations can't even answer those basic questions, it becomes nearly impossible to enforce policies and control how user-owned devices interact with sensitive data.
Given the knowledge gap, it's no surprise that over the last several years we've seen a huge explosion of mobile device management (MDM) products and many an IT manager has looked high and low for a 'magic bullet' point product that could ease their mobile headaches. Unfortunately, BYOD and mobile in general are trends from which no single product and no amount of fairy dust is going to protect the network. MDM may be useful for the device, but when it comes to protecting the network in a new era of BYOD, it's going to take good old-fashioned defense-in-depth and the work necessary to tie together a fabric of protections that can identify and control mobile device activity on the network.
When you do it right, this integrated set of technologies can help foster what we like to call the 'self-sealing network,' essentially an environment that can intelligently keep malware and malicious code from spreading to the network while keeping sensitive data from leaking out of the network. The elements that go into creating a self-sealing network-technologies like network access control, secure Web gateway, data loss prevention and SIEM-are all useful components in any effective security strategy. But it's the integration of these vital technologies that we believe can be most valuable in supporting secure BYOD. It's why we at Trustwave have worked hard to develop seamless integration for these key technologies in our portfolio, so customers can have a simple, single pane of glass that offers central audit and enforcement for all mobile users and activities.
If you'd like to learn more about what it will take to create a self-sealing network, check out the whitepaper Keep Calm and Bring Your Own.
