As mobile devices have become essential part of human life, soon it will be used as a tool for the employee to enhance their productivity. While workplace flexibility and convenience is increasing, mobile employees are actually putting enormous amounts of company data at risk. Most of the time employees use third party applications, ignores security updates, access unprotected network connections that leave personal and corporate data at risk and become the easiest target for the cyber criminals.

To reduce such risk from employee end, Alvaro Hoyos, the Chief Information Security Officer at OneLogin has suggested some tips that will surely enable organizations to double check the mobile user’s and the employee’s security.

Realistic Security Policies:

The organizations should prefer more reliable and realistic policies, if they implement policies that are rigged as compare to organization’s maturity, chances are that the employees will subvert or ignore them altogether.
Policies should be strict but also workable, so that it influence employee to follow the policy and get their work done. This is important when it comes to mobile users that operates cooperate applications on their Smartphone or tablets. Policies should be implemented for every device that is being used by the employees.

Multifactor authentication:

As many employees access their information and work for the organization from a remote location, it is most important to assure that right person is using the right information. For that Multi-factor authentication should be used that guarantees the access controls.
The hackers are evolving their attacking techniques; the only way to protect unauthorized access is to implement multi-factor authorization for mobile users to reduce the risk of any hacking incident.

Empower Employee:

Organizations deploy many automated detection systems that alerts them with any uncertain or unexpected activity. This process can spread to granular part of the organization that is employees. By empowering employees to become a part of the organization’s detection plan, employees will get to know about the activities they have direct control over, such as changing their password or logging in from a new location, it will help organization to make employee the part of the early detection plan.

Understanding the Risk of Mobility:

Mobile devices, whether those used by employees or by mobile users, should not be the primary or users with complete access or should be carrying organizational confidential information. The organizations should consider the risk of stolen or misplaced devices, that how devastating it could be. To overcome this critical issue, mobile user should protect their devices with a trusted SaaS solution. Additionally, documents on mobile systems should be backed up on a daily basis.
Furthermore, policies should be defined for the mobile end users that what data can be copied to mobile devices and what data should never leave those same systems.

Continuous Monitoring and tracking:

As employees are accessing the systems from mobile devices in a huge number, it is possible that the device may get lost, stolen or misplaced. In such case asset tracking system should be implemented. No doubt these solutions are expensive, but worth investing to protect an organization’s asset from falling into the wrong hands.  Devices that are no longer in use or have been lost or stolen need to be tracked as well, in case they reappear on your network.

Just as making sure about which remote device is doing what from where, threats will be still there. Monitoring is the best option to expose the uncertain activities to prevent the employees to enter privileged mode or access the restricted information. Unauthorized mobile users can be devastating for any organization, so prevention techniques should be implemented to reduce this risk.