Device Security Measures You Can Take for Your Organization

Mobile device security is a growing topic among businesses with employees who rely on mobile technology for company communications. In fact, many modern businesses expect employees to use their smartphones to access email, internal communications, and data. With trends such as the rise of remote work, increased cybersecurity breaches, and reliance on technology, it’s important for companies to be actively involved in guiding their employee base toward secure use of devices.

So what measures can your organization take to make sure that the devices that your employees use for work are protected and secure? You can create policies, secure endpoints, and provide security awareness training to your employee base.

Create Device Security Standards and Policies

Getting the right device security policies (or rules) in place can be a daunting task because device security overlaps with so many different policy types, such as information security, data governance, and acceptable use policies. Usually, the best path forward is to have an experienced third party, such as a consultant or managed IT services provider, help develop the policies that make sense for your organization. Not only does a third-party bring experience, but they also field questions that will help define the specific use policies for your organization.

After you know what your policies should be, you’ll need to write them and deploy them to your organization. This is another task that a third-party can do for you. They can write your policies around acceptable use, data storage, technology procurement, and even regulatory compliance.

Use Mobile Device Management (MDM)

After you have your policies in place, some of them can be enforced through mobile device management. MDM allows you to set up technical policies for mobile devices. This will set up an added layer of security protocols, which may include enforcing lock screen, blocking invasive apps, as well as protocols for when a device should be wiped (e.g., after 10 failed login attempts) and more.

Note: No matter what you choose to put in place, it’s important that your user base is informed of what technical policies end up being put in place for mobile device management.

You can learn more about MDM services as well as other security products and services here.

Encourage User Awareness Training

The human factor is and always will be the weakest link in cybersecurity. With how advanced technology has become over the past decade, the advancement of cyber attacks has equally increased. And now we are seeing a level of sophistication that has a more con-artist feel to it. Modern cyber-attacks on small businesses cast a wide net to find behavioral vulnerabilities. Once cyber-criminals have someone going down a path, they can tailor the experience to the individual and use social engineering to circumvent much of what you can put in place through policies (both administrative and technical). Because of this, the best defense is educating employees with good cyber hygiene. And there are several ways you can do that. Endsight offers two free options as well as more advanced simulated phishing training.

• Cybersecurity Fundamentals Training (free) – Endsight provides monthly cybersecurity fundamentals training for the end-users of each of our customers as well as their friends and family (and anyone else who wants it). We figure the more people who are operating technology securely, the better. Besides, it doesn’t cost us anything extra to provide these trainings outside of our user base. Learn more here.
• 365 Tip of the Week Newsletter (free) – Endsight also provides a weekly email newsletter that includes a cyber safety tip. Traditionally, the newsletter was limited to one Microsoft 365 productivity tip, but over time we started including the occasional cyber safety tip. Our readers loved it, and we never looked back. So now each week our readers get more productive and more safe with each installment of the newsletter. Learn more here.
• Simulated Phishing Testing and Training – As an ongoing solution, Endsight sends fake phishing emails to customers and monitors which users fall victim to ‘scams’. These are reactively trained. Continual phishing tests and training keeps users aware of security threats and reduces the human error.

Devices are here to stay and becoming a more intricate part of the way we work. The importnat thing to remember is that you have options for keeping your company data protected through mobile device security. I hope you found this article helpful as you explore device security for your organization.