Mobile security for enterprise is trending in cybersecurity

It is 2020 and Bring-Your-Own-Device is still trending. Every day, petabytes of information zoom through employee devices in an organization. And this will certainly not stop. According to Crystal Market Research, the global Bring-Your-Own-Device (BYOD) market will reach $318.41 billion by 2022. The report accredits this trend to the consumerization of IT as people continue connecting devices to networks.

With its flexibility, BYOD can potentially have a security impact on the existing IT infrastructure, such as modern organizations using a mix of LANs, WLANs and distributed WANs. When employees across an organization connect their devices to the network, in certain cases, it may create an entry vector point for cybercriminals.

Often enough, issues arise due to the absence of information within an audit of employee devices being leveraged over a network. Companies seldom conduct thorough checks to ensure employees use their devices in accordance with security policies. This basic step could lead to spiralling costs and, continuous monitoring may be perceived as an invasion of an employee’s privacy.

In addition, an organization must ensure its business-critical data are kept in silos. Companies should back up and promote the containerization of important corporate data. This helps mitigate the risk of data loss in the event hackers gain access to employee devices or due to technical glitches.  Organizations need top-end security solutions for a seamless wireless mobile network.

Wired Solutions

At the heart of providing a seamless mobile and wireless network, a wired network security framework is pertinent. Threats are evolving each day and there is a need for state-of-the-art security framework.

The modern structure of security should include firewalls, deep packet inspection of encrypted traffic (DPI-SSL), and cloud-based multi-engine sandboxing. Additionally, organizations should have antivirus, anti‐spyware, intrusion prevention, content filtering, as well as application control services.

However, hackers are becoming smarter by the day and are now leveraging various encryption protocols to get through organizations’ security gates with the use of transport layer security (TLS), secure sockets layer (SSL), and secure shell (SSH). Organizations should implement firewalls, which can decrypt encrypted traffic through DPI-SSL to identify and remediate threats that are hidden within incoming traffic.

If threats exist beyond this point, a firewall will redirect malicious traffic to a cloud-based platform, which is in a sandbox environment for further analysis. The sandbox platform should provide hypervisor level analysis of the data while resisting every invasion tactic.

This method of protection can also be used for email analysis to pick out anomalies like ransomware, which is often used to target organizations’ email IDs.

Secured Wireless Networks

The best way to secure a wireless local area network is to align wireless with the enterprise network, scale the organizations current security framework and choose the apt technology in terms of VPNs to authentication tools. This should match the reliability of 802.11ac Wave 2 wireless technology. The Wave 2 access points should integrate with the modern firewall security features to ensure smooth wireless traffic free from any sort of network threats.

It is also imperative to have multiple antennas and support for other Wave 2 features to scale the quality of the signal in highly dense environments. The framework also needs to have support or MU-MIMO (multi-user, multiple input, multiple output) so it can create access points to numerous wireless clients.

Furthermore, in order to secure the mobility aspect, it is important to provide context-aware device authentication, granular access control, web-based secure access and support for all types of platforms. IT administrators, as a protocol, will have to scan all remote traffic connected to the organization's wired network. This can be done by modern-day firewalls that ensure the security of SSL VPN traffic. Provisions can be made in the framework that authorizes the scanning of files for unknown threats. Lastly, the system must have the ability to give users a single sign-in for resources on the cloud and on-premises.

All these pertinent cybersecurity processes require enhanced computing power. There is a need for high-speed processors, which can be used together for deep packet inspection without hindering performance.

Unsecured networks leave organizations vulnerable to attack. Now is the time for companies to prioritize their security as a potentially serious business risk.

By Debasish Mukherjee, Country Director India & SAARC, SonicWall