The smartphone is both one of the most widely proliferated tools in the enterprise, and one of the most troublesome. It’s a safe bet that every employee in your firm has one, but when it comes to whether or not they’re allowed to use it for work, the odds are closer to 50/50. We all know what powerful and useful tools our mobile devices are, but for IT teams they can be a logistical and security nightmare.
The Problem With Smartphones
While our smartphones are amazingly useful in our personal lives for staying connected and boosting productivity, IT teams have a much different outlook. Personal devices add a massive hole in enterprise security when not properly locked down, causing a myriad of problems for network admins and data officers.
The only problem is, once those devices have been “locked down” using mobile device management solutions, they become far less useful to the end user. Furthermore, most employees won’t want their personal devices locked down, which means that if a business wants to leverage smartphones as a tool for their workforce, they’d need to buy them as well.
So, it sounds like it might be easier to leave personal mobile devices out of the corporate workflow, right? But then what happens when the CEO walks into the IT team’s office and says he wants to get work email on his iPhone?
Securing the Smartphone
Luckily, there is a way to introduce mobile devices to the enterprise ecosystem without breaches security or making them virtually unusable with MDM. By deploying stronger multi factor authentication solutions, businesses can control access to their digital assets much more effectively, and the best part is that the smartphone itself is what enables this.
By leveraging mobile-based multi factor authentication, including biometrics, enterprises can optimize identity and access management and utilize smartphones in a productive away that also secures how employees access their work accounts and data on those devices. That way, the CEO can access his email, the marketing team can monitor social media and sales can use their smartphones on a daily basis, without sacrificing overall security in the system.
