Why Must Endpoint Management And Mobile Threat Defense Go Hand-in-hand?

We are in the third decade of the 21st century, an era where businesses are riding a new wave of technological innovations and complexities. Organizations around the world are embracing enterprise mobility strategies, and the adoption of mobile devices for enterprise use necessitates that IT admins use UEM  (Unified Endpoint Management) tools to manage such devices. Although such tools make it easy to provision and monitor devices, offer remote support, and generate real-time reports, there’s no denying that business also need tools to protect their assets against cybersecurity threats.

Mobility creates an additional attack surface, one that exposes corporate data to a wide range of cyber threats operating at multiple levels. Here are a few data points from a recent Symantec report that will help you understand the severity of these threats:

• On an average, 42 million malware attacks are launched on mobile devices every year
• Over 60 percent of greyware apps (such as adware and spyware) leak device phone numbers
• Nearly 20 percent of industry and business apps leak personal identification data

And this is just the tip of the iceberg. According to Pradeo, a leading MTD (Mobile Threat Defense) solution provider, “Smartphones and tablets have inherent capabilities that, when exploited illegally, can provide direct access to all the data they manipulate.”¹ With the rise in the number of organizations using mobile devices to enable their workforce, the focus of cybercriminals looking to exploit business-critical data to their advantage has naturally shifted toward mobile devices. Pradeo also notes that “Mobile threats can operate at three different layers of a device: 78% of them use mobile applications, 10% exploit the OS, and 12% leverage the network.”¹

Therefore, while it’s imperative for businesses to have a solution that can help them have granular-level control over their devices, they must have a mechanism to prevent devices from falling prey to miscreants looking to access business information. MDM (Mobile Device Management) and MAM (Mobile Application Management) tools do not have any insight into application characteristics, and as such, cannot detect or neutralize cyber threats. They are not capable of reacting to mobile cybersecurity threats dynamically or stopping attacks with policy-based compliance actions. An MTD solution, however, is designed to do those things.

According to Gartner, “The MTD solution market consists of solutions that protect organizations from threats on iOS and Android devices. MTD solutions provide protection by preventing, detecting and remediating attacks. Different MTD solutions employ different techniques. In general, MTD solutions collect and analyze indicators of compromise to identify anomalous behavior and counter threats. To do so, MTD solutions gather threat intelligence from the devices they support as well as from external sources. By observing the behavior of healthy devices and the behavior of devices under attack, MTD solutions learn to recognize malicious and suspicious behavior and intervene to remediate it.”²

Today, around 90 percent of the global workforce is mobile, with a majority of workers using personal devices for work. In a mobile-first world where business data is constantly being transmitted between applications, mobile devices, connected objects, etc. striking the right balance between security and mobility is challenging to say the least. 

A GDPR Survey conducted by Pradeo to allow businesses to test their mobile practices against the new regulation requirements revealed that though most businesses expose information through mobile workers, less than one-third of businesses have implemented an MTD solution to secure their fleet of mobile devices, making them vulnerable to a data breach. In fact, data breaches compromised 2.5 billion data records in 2017.

For an organization, data security and device security are equally important. So, regardless of how well they manage their devices, businesses can still be in trouble if their data is at risk. This is precisely why both UEM and MTD must go hand-in-hand. SureMDM MTD enables threat response and mitigagtion to safeguard business data and ensure policy compliance.