Significance of Endpoint Security for Mobile Devices

Endpoint security for mobile devices is a cybersecurity measure that allows organizations to protect all the devices on their networks and prevent unauthorized access to their systems. A mobile endpoint security solution helps businesses safeguard all the devices that employees use for work, either on their networks or in the cloud. 

Mobile device security enables companies to gain greater visibility of the devices and systems across their networks. It helps reduce the attack surface, detect and prevent threats in real-time, and automate responses to security events.

Mobile endpoint security helps enterprises protect users’ devices and data, as well as prevent unauthorized users from accessing sensitive corporate or personal information. Other noteworthy benefits of an endpoint protection mobile approach include:

1. Enforcing corporate security policies
2. Ensuring compliance with data privacy and industry regulations
3. Automating device registration
4. Remote control of device patching and updating 
5. Ensuring regular data backup
6. Taking control of applications that users can download or use
7. Providing support for bring-your-own-device (BYOD) policies

For more information, read about the benefits of endpoint security here.

To ensure their networks are sufficiently protected, organizations can pick and choose from a wide range of mobile device protection methods. These include:

A cloud access security broker (CASB) is a hardware or software tool that sits between users and cloud services to enforce an organization’s security policies. CASBs enable companies to explore unusual user activity, gain deep visibility of their cloud environments, and ensure granular control of cloud access and usage. 

CASBs are playing an increasingly important role in protecting businesses against cloud-borne security threats and ensuring data privacy and regulatory compliance. They can shield networks from threats as employees use mobile devices, especially unmanaged personal devices, from new locations.

An endpoint protection platform secures entire business networks and all of the devices that connect to them. It provides enterprise-wide, continuous protection of devices and a central portal that enables administrators to monitor and control their entire IT environment.

A virtual private network (VPN) creates private connections that enable users to access and browse the internet anonymously and securely. A VPN uses encryption to keep users’ internet activity private and prevent their data from being snooped on by cyber criminals.

A VPN is particularly important when employees connect to business networks or systems from public Wi-Fi networks. These unsecured networks increase the risk of personal data, such as login credentials and the contents of email messages, being spied on or stolen by hackers. A VPN hides information like the user’s location, Internet Protocol (IP) address, and web activity.

A secure web gateway (SWG) is a security solution that uses web filtering to enforce an organization’s internet access policies. It enables companies to filter out unwanted software from user-initiated connections that can damage the corporate network.

SWGs are particularly important as organizations move to the cloud, which increases their attack surface and creates more web-based traffic security risks. They help thwart internet-based threats without disrupting the user experience, using capabilities like application control, data loss prevention (DLP), deep Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) and secure sockets layer (SSL) inspection, remote browser isolation, and Uniform Resource Locator (URL) filtering.

Email remains the most used corporate communication tool for sending messages to clients, colleagues, customers, friends, and family. As such, email security is essential for protecting the data that employees send and receive on their devices. Because of the continuing prevalence of email use, it is no surprise that malicious entities increasingly use it as an attack vector, from phishing scams to spreading malware and initiating ransomware attacks. 

Email security protects organizations and their users from email-borne attacks. Common email protection tools include antivirus programs, email encryption, secure email gateways, multi-factor authentication (MFA), and spam filters. 

Mobile device management (MDM) is a security approach that allows organizations to enforce security policies and manage, monitor, and secure employees’ mobile devices, such as laptops, smartphones, and tablets. It protects corporate networks by protecting the range of mobile devices that connect to them. 

MDM also enables organizations to safely adopt a BYOD strategy, which enables employees to use their own devices instead of being restricted to corporate-issued devices. This, in the long run, can result in greater efficiency and productivity.

Aside from the above approaches, it is also crucial for organizations to provide regular employee training on mobile security best practices, especially recognizing the signs of phishing and social engineering.