Dimension Data: How to ensure secure enterprise mobility

The capability to adapt to change swiftly and smoothly is one of the best ways to ensure business viability. The last five years has seen data and device use going wireless and mobile, with more businesses making the most of their manpower and the devices these personnel use.

Smaller, lighter devices are replacing larger machines and enabling people to do business whether they are in the office, at home or stuck in traffic.

The arena of EM where organizations utilize mobile devices offers great benefits, but it also has its risky areas. Dimension Data’s experience in deploying wireless infrastructure and enterprise mobility solutions across multiple industries and geographies provides benefits for organizations that seek this kind of expertise from the systems integration specialist.

Dimension Data provides enterprises with EM solutions. The company has valuable insights into the challenges, best practices and technologies in the EM space with its Enterprise Mobility Development Model (EMDM), which helps organizations prioritize their investments in wireless and mobility projects.

EMDM is a collaborative workshop tool that enables users to cycle through critical reflection points for addressing and progressing

through its EM capabilities and strategies. It maps the current stage of an organization's standing in terms of the various disciplines of enterprise mobility, their desired future state and a development path to achieve their goals.

Going mobile

Speaking at the Ayala Group of Companies' recently-concluded ICT Summit 2013, Dimension Data General Manager for Security Solutions and Enterprise Mobility Guido Crucq weighed in on the pros and cons of EM, BYOD and wireless connectivity.

With EM, organizations can respond faster to customer needs, reduce costs and increase productivity by saving time on paperwork and processes by empowering their personnel to complete these tasks while on the go.

Crucq said that while BYOD is gaining popularity, many enterprises are cautious in their approach to wireless connectivity and EM “because of security concerns, and the need to be flexible in using multiple platforms simultaneously, among other things.”

He cited a recent Ovum Global BYOD survey across 20 industries. The global average given by this IT think-tank is this: 57.1 percent of businesses allow and support BYOD in the workplace. The highest numbers, at close to 70 percent in this survey, come from the IT & Telecoms and Financial Services businesses, followed by Media/Publishing at over 65 percent.

Crucq also cited a study by Gallup Consulting that showed that “companies with engaged employees see 18 percent higher productivity and 51 percent lower turnover.” According to him, organizations “see a 20-percent to 25-percent boost in productivity with the use of social media.”

New needs

Cost-efficient, productivity-enhancing and choice-empowering system are all good, but Crucq cautioned that organizations seeking to leverage EM must also focus on securing their networks and supporting several operating system platforms and versions across several device types.

In this increasingly net-connected world, any organization adopting EM must be vigilant about external threats: Distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks and mass attempts at identity theft that target not just the organization’s IT systems, but their end-users and customers, too.

Crucq also shared EM best practices: First, “establish a strategic roadmap” to enable the organization to “better understand the EM environment and develop their strategy. Next, he recommended using the roadmap to “align all stakeholders in an organization on their 'as-is' and required 'to-be' range of EM competencies.” He said organizations embarking on the EM path should “produce a prioritized list of projects and visual roadmap to close the gap” between where an organization stands and where it wants to be.

Operating systems and malware: Android (over 600 versions and 79 percent of total malware attacks); Windows 8 (five versions and 0.3 percent of malware attacks); BlackBerry (four versions and 0.1 percent of malware attacks) and; MacOS (three versions and 0.7 percent of malware attacks).

To keep an EM network secure, the CIO and tech support team of an organization must ensure that secure device management covers device configuration, device inventory, posture assessment, user access, secure connectivity, the ability to do a remote wipe on a misplaced or stolen device when needed, data protection and encryption and the white-listing and black-listing of specific applications.