Businesses Lock Down Mobile Devices
With so many cloud services on the market today, providers need something different to rise above the fray. That’s what Trend Micro’s Mobile Security offered AlertBoot, a cloud-based disk encryption service.
“It allowed us to offer customers our full-disk encryption service as well as mobile management of smartphones and tablets,” says Tim Maliyil, founder and CEO of AlertBoot in Las Vegas. “People saw the difference, and we’ve done very well, especially in healthcare fields where people are concerned with meeting HIPAA security requirements.”
Maliyil says Trend Micro’s mobile product was so effective that AlertBoot also migrated to Trend Micro’s full-disk encryption last summer. The Trend Micro security infrastructure can scale well as AlertBoot’s enterprise and government customers add users.
The company evaluated several mobile security products but found Trend Micro’s the most stable. “Plus, we found it to be better in terms of reporting and the way it confirmed or denied policies,” Maliyil says. “It’s also easy to use, which is important to our customers, many of whom are small business owners or sole proprietors with minimal IT staff.”
Phil Hochmuth, security products program manager for IDC, says AlertBoot’s approach jibes with some of IDC’s research on mobile security. “We found that the vast majority of organizations try to find extensions to traditional security products,” he says. “Sometimes, it’s a matter of going with the security tools you have in the wireless LANs, firewalls or VPN, while in other cases organizations don’t want to train their limited IT staffs on multiple technologies.”
A Total Package
Meadville Medical Center, a private hospital in Meadville, Pa., with roughly 1,200 users, uses Sophos Mobile Control as part of a suite of security products.
36.5%
The percentage of IT managers who say they have experienced a breach or data loss in which a mobile device was a factor
SOURCE: “U.S. Mobile Security Survey, 2013” (IDC, April 2013)
Systems Administrator Jeri Sample added the mobile management capability last year, following the deployment of Sophos antivirus, data loss prevention and web filtering. “We deployed a spam filter for our email, and the mobile management came with it,” she says. “But we were moving in that direction anyway because we sought better control of our devices.”
Sample says the Sophos mobility software lets the medical center remotely wipe a lost phone and lock the screen if the device isn’t used after 15 minutes. And when an employee leaves the hospital, Sample can remotely wipe the Sophos interface to ensure the former worker can’t access the network.
