If you’re under pressure to help your SMB mobile workers increase productivity but worried that enabling mobile access to your network and resources could pose a data security risk, you’re right.
Mobile device adoption in the workplace, both employer issued and personally owned BYOD, has increased significantly. Often, mobile workers are using the same device for both business and personal use, resulting in the intermingling of business and personal data and applications. With this, organizations are at increased risk of security breaches such as:
- Unauthorized users gaining access to company networks and systems from lost or stolen devices
- Malware infected devices acting as a conduit to infect company systems
- Interception of company data in-flight on unsecured public wifi networks.
- Loss of business data stored on devices if rogue personal apps or unauthorized users gain access to that data.
To help enable mobile worker productivity while protecting from threats, Dell™ SonicWALL™ demonstrated at Mobile World Congress this week, a secure mobile access solution, which includes both the SonicWALL Mobile Connect application, available for iOS, Mac OSX, Android, Kindle Fire and Windows 8.1 mobile devices, and the SonicWALL Secure Remote Access (SRA) series appliance. The solution provides mobile and remote workers using smart phones, tablets or laptops — whether company or personally owned — with policy-enforced SSL-VPN access to mission-critical applications, data and resources, including shared folders, client-server applications, intranet sites, virtual desktops and email, without compromising security. Our partner Bennett Office Technologies demonstrates how it works in this video:
To protect organizational networks from mobile malware and rogue access, the solution enables administrators to establish and enforce security policies that provide a one-two punch to protect from mobile threats. Context-aware authentication, now available with SRA series release 7.5 and Mobile Connect 3.0, enables policies to be configured and enforced that not only authenticate the user, but also validate the security state of a mobile device before granting access to network resources. Mobile devices are interrogated for essential security information such as jailbreak or root status, device ID, certificate status and OS versions prior to granting access. Devices that do not meet policy requirements are not allowed network access and the user is notified of non-compliance, greatly reducing the chances of malware entering the network from non-IT managed devices.
In addition, the new Mobile Connect 3.0 and SRA 7.5 releases deliver the first secure access gateway solution that helps protect company data at rest on mobile devices. Authenticated users can securely browse and view allowed intranet file shares and files from within the Mobile Connect app. Administrators can establish and enforce mobile application management policy for the Mobile Connect app to control whether files viewed can be opened in other apps, copied to the clipboard, printed or cached securely within the Mobile Connect app. This allows administrators to isolate business data from personal data stored on the device and reduces the risk of data loss. In addition, if the user’s credentials are revoked, content stored in the Mobile Connect app is locked and can no longer be accessed or viewed.
Mobility and BYOD can introduce new data security threats, but by implementing an effective secure mobile access solution, you can enable the mobile productivity workers demand, while protecting company data and resources from mobile threats.
For more information regarding Dell SonicWALL secure mobile access solutions, click here. To learn more about the new Dell SonicWALL SRA series release 7.5 and Mobile Connect 3.0 release, please see the release admin guides or user guides.
