Gone are the days when everyone came into the office everyday for work. Changes in work habits have brought substantial growth in mobility adoption within the workforce and security challenges have followed.
Today’s employees increasingly work from outside the office and they use a number of mobile (often personal) devices to complete their daily business tasks. Gallup’s Work and Education Poll from August 2015 points out that telecommuting for work has climbed up to 37 percent in the United States.
A June 2014 survey by Gartner points out that approximately 40 percent of U.S. consumers who work for large organizations said they use their personally owned smartphone, tablet, desktop or laptop daily for some form of work. Mingling business and personal data can and does cause major security problems, since all of us may inadvertently share sensitive company information with the wrong person.
Employers need control and visibility to data security now, more than ever before, beyond what traditional solutions offer. In order to protect sensitive data, employers are looking to persistent data-centric security to tether their sensitive data all the time and anywhere.
Employers thinking about implementing a persistent data security approach to deal with today’s mobility challenges may want to consider the following key points:
-
Sensitive data must be protected at the point of origin and through its life-cycle
Highly sensitive data critical to core business functions must be protected at the source and not at the perimeter. Companies must protect data while in use whether someone is creating it or accessing it from file shares or repositories Controlling the life span of sensitive information, including disabling access dynamically is key to protecting it on mobile devices and cloud repositories. -
Encryption alone is not sufficient
Protection of confidential, private or highly sensitive information should combine encryption with persistent usage policies to ensure that businesses control under what conditions a user can have access and what an authorized user can do with this information once access is granted. -
Sensitive data will be localized at places you don’t know, control or trust
In the daily course of business, whether through user error, complacency or malicious activity, companies lose control of sensitive data. Because the places data goes may be untrusted, one cannot rely on the security of the network, device or application to protect that data. Data must be protected all the time regardless of location or devices. -
You need visibility into who accesses the protected data, when, and how many times
Detailed visibility ensures auditability and insight into usage patterns and potential issues, which in turn significantly improves control.
Since we live in a mobile and digital work environment, organizations must secure business documents that are portable, easy to copy and more prone to data breaches. Although many organizations have made large investments in perimeter based security, they are still getting breached. Insider threats and employee data theft are a top concern to every business as this type of breach, which often are the most damaging, can mean the end of business.
You can continue putting all of your resources into perimeter based security or you can look to persistent data-centric security for your data protection – all the time and anywhere.
