Mobile security and ease of use – They can go together

Employees today feel like they should be able to use their personal devices to accomplish job functions. But it’s unavoidable that BYOD increases the mobile cybersecurity risk faced by enterprises.

At many company’s security and ease of use are presented as an “either-or” situation with many companies having a zero BYOD policy, while others implement onerous security policies that frustrate employees.

How many employees do you feel have used their personal devices and downloaded unapproved applications over their companies’ network to get work done?

But here’s the good news for IT managers – there is wireless technology which meets these security challenges in an efficient and economical way. Effective mobile security and a better end user experience don’t have to be mutually exclusive. These newer systems allow for a great amount of end-user self-service, reducing the workload burden on IT teams.

As the perfect example, we promote and often install the Cloudpath Enrolment System from Ruckus Networks for customers. Cloudpath is advanced software that delivers secure network access for any user, and any device on any network, which can be delivered as-a-Service from our cloud. Cloudpath allows end users to provision their own devices for network access, which means reduced trouble tickets relating to access problems

CloudPath secures every connection with WPA2-Enterprise, protecting data in transit between the device and the access point with powerful encryption. This provides visibility and control over which devices are on the network and enable IT teams to define and manage policies so that every user sees only the network resources that they should see. A typical example of this could be granting access to a headless network printer.  It also integrates with leading MDM and NAC solutions, complementing and enhancing a company’s mobile security position.

CloudPath also checks the security flags of devices during onboarding to ensure that they comply with the company’s security policies. The system redirects users with noncompliant devices to remediate them before granting access. It associates every device with a user, and IT can easily revoke access at any time - for example when a BYOD user leaves the organisation.

Employees leaving an organisation is another example of mobile security and ease of use not typically going hand in hand.  IT teams are often faced with keeping their wireless security optimal and refresh pre-shared keys for every device when an employee left or leaving the possibility for that employee to roam onto the company’s network in the future. CloudPath, being a security certificate-based solution allows the ease of off boarding devices as much as it does on-boarding – an often over looked process!

We hope you have been able to gage that mobile security and ease of use is possible. IF you have any questions surrounding mobile security or CloudPath, please contact DigitalAir.