Nowadays, and even more since the beginning of the pandemic which obliged most of your staff (if not all) to work from home, a mobile device management system is a must have for any business. Unmanaged remote endpoints are one of the biggest risks for your organization. Mobile devices are portable in nature and provides the means to perform your work from anywhere. This portability can offer many advantages, but it comes with downsides – specially from a security stand point – such as unauthorized data access and data leakage.
What is the purpose of such system? How it helps to improve the security posture of your organization? These are the main questions this article will try to answer.
Purpose of Mobile Device Management software
How can you be sure that access to your corporate applications from an employee-owned device is secure? This question is basically the main reason for explaining the purpose of a MDM solution if you want to leverage the portability that mobile devices can offers for your staff.
To reduce the likelihood of being attacked by cybercriminals, a MDM solution should provide the means to secure employee-owned devices by allowing to:
- Create security policies;;
- Push security policies, settings and software configurations on mobile devices;
- Identify potential mobile devices vulnerabilities
It should enable IT Admins to securely monitor and manage the mobile devices that access your corporate applications and control what is stored on the device, what application can be installed on the device, what are the security requirements for the device (e.g. pin code to unlock) and should permit to remotely swipe the device in case of lost or if the device is stolen.
Advantages of using a MDM software
The main purpose of enterprise MDM or mobile device management is to allow enterprises to focus on improving productivity of their employees by allowing them to access corporate data from anywhere using corporate or personally-owned mobile device.
On the other hand, for IT admins MDM software should ease the deployment and allow to manage multiple types of devices in order to:
- Save time by automating repetitive tasks like WIFI configuration;
- Improve efficiency with tailor made policies for your organization;
- Increase productivity of your staff;
- Achieve compliance and enhance security ;
- Management devices remotely
Security
Again, a MDM solution should allow your organization to be able to enforce security policies efficiently.
Through a centralized system, every device accessing your network can be aligned with your organization’s policies by restricting access to certain applications and by enforcing security controls.
The MDM solution should also have the ability to revoke access to the company network in case the device doesn’t comply with the security policies (e.g. end user disabled the anti-virus, end user removed the pin code to unlock his/her phone). In such event the MDM solution must automatically withdraw the necessary certificate to block connection from this device.
And last but not least, the MDM solution must have the ability to wipe the device remotely in case the device is being stolen or lost in order to protect corporate data and prevent data loss.
Conclusion
To conclude, I believe that through this article you understand the need of having a MDM solution to protect your organization and still provide your employees with a modern way of working.
The market for such solution has expanded over the last years, so the next step is then to discuss with the different vendors and measure the pros and cons depending on your environment, the size of your organization and the capabilities the vendors can offer with their products.
