Mobile Device Security

[#1]

If you as an IT administrator have spent sleepless nights wondering what to do with the onslaught of mobile devices in your enterprise and when the day will come when you get summoned to the corner office to explain a security breach that has occurred under your watch – do we have a sleeping pill for you !

Coming in August – “Mobile Device Security for Dummies” (ISBN 978-0470927533), is your ticket to a better night’s sleep (no offense to the mattress manufacturer who goes by a similar tag line).

The book delves into the deepest recesses of what makes these smart devices so potent and the burgeoning list of capabilities that they amass over time and the potential hazard each of these capabilities brings forth with it – and for some odd reason the marketing department of the handset vendors do not explicitly call out these risks!

But if you know the increased risk and the exposure these devices have on your IT assets, your headache just got worse. But wait, there is more.  We don’t leave you hanging high and dry. There are detailed recommendations on how you would plan for the onslaught of these devices into your network, what kind of policies you should employ, how to oversee the user and the usage of these devices, and ways to ensure that these devices conform to your corporate mandated policies.

For the more technically inclined, we peel back the onion to reveal the security capabilities that exist both on the device and those that are augmented by the network capabilities.

Best practices guidance is sprinkled liberally throughout the book through numerous case studies and we round off the book with “Part of tens” as  a quick reference guide for “checklist items before enabling corporate access for smartphone users”, “online information sources” and “mobile security vendors”.

Happy reading !

[#2]

Or you could just run cisco anyconnect, skip the book, and sleep like a baby.

[#3]

Cisco AnyConnect or any number of mobile VPN clients in the market serve an important purpose of securing mobile device traffic to the corporate and enforcing corporate policies. However, the poster of the comment reflects the prevailing widespread misconception that this alone protects the device and by extension the enterprise assets from attack. This conviction ignores that a VPN client does not address a range of critical issues from device backup/restore, remote wipe, removable media on the device as a source of data leakage, SMS spamming or device protection against attacks from various radio interfaces. This should whet your appetite. Now go ahead and read the book and then you can really sleep soundly !