Risks associated with personal devices can be mitigated by developing effective BYOD strategies

Pradeepan V
CTO, Inflow Technologies

“Bring-Your-Own-Device (BYOD) policies are becoming more and more popular in the workplace. Billions of devices are expected to be in use at workplaces. The rapid adoption is due to the surge in usage of mobiles devices like smartphones, laptops and tablets. Employees prefer using their own devices rather than using organization-owned devices at workplaces as it gives more flexible working options.

While BYOD increases productivity, users who does not understand their company’s BYOD security policies expose their organization to security vulnerabilities to a greater extent. The growing concern among organizations are users unknowingly downloading malware-ridden apps which has the potential to take control over the user’s mobile device followed by breaches due to theft or stolen devices with sensitive business data. BYOD is also acting as driving force to increase insider threats and detecting and mitigating these insider threats are also becoming difficult to IT teams.

Risks associated with personal devices can be mitigated by developing effective BYOD strategies. Organizations have started embracing BYOD actively and are modifying their IT policies anticipating the share of BYOD devices that use corporate network will continue to increase at a fast pace. A Mobile Device Management solution (MDM) is crucial in BYOD security as it gives IT admins the control to lock the device or remotely erase the data in case of an incident or when an employee leaves the organization to ensure sensitive information is not exposed. When MDM’s are coupled with features like app visibility, access control, apps management and file integrity monitoring, IT admins will have the optimum level of device control.

Practises like use of SSO, Multifactor Authentication and VPN’s along with MDM solutions prevent sensitive data getting leaked especially over public wireless hotspots when users are outside the organization network, and can create barriers between personal and official data on a personal device. Implementing these solutions along with security awareness trainings for employees will address most concerns around the Bring Your Own Device programs in organizations.

Organizations are now exploring on how AI can help Cybersecurity analysts improve on the accuracy responding to Cyber-attacks. The rate of adoption of AI in Cybersecurity is increasing and more organizations are expected to adopt AI in the coming years to detect, predict and respond to cyber threats in real time. However, as on date most organizations are using AI for threat detection primarily as tracking anomalies in real time is becoming a challenge due to the increase in data volume. With Cyber-attacks increasing and threats becoming more sophisticated, AI in Cybersecurity is becoming a key mitigation strategy to counter Cyber-attacks by organizations.”