The biggest threat is employees, both nontechnical and those working in IT. While 81 percent of enterprises said staffers pose the largest risk to mobile security, almost half of all IT pros were willing to sacrifice standard security procedures if it meant “getting the job done.” Add in the now-distributed nature of corporate operations and it’s a recipe for mobile disaster.
The Challenge of Managing Moving Targets
Corporate endpoints are no longer static. Gone are the days of privileged network access contained to a small number of onsite desktop and laptop devices. Today, endpoints go everywhere with users and may request access to protected corporate information anywhere, anytime.
As noted by Forbes, this creates a new security framework, one where mobile identity functions as a protection perimeter. Pre-COVID-19, 89 percent of security leaders pointed to mobile devices as the next logical step in digital identification to access corporate resources. Today, these same mobile devices are often the only way staff can reliably connect to company networks.
While it’s helpful for employees to use straightforward security solutions such as virtual private networks to protect digital assets, that’s just the beginning. In a world where users are both the best line of defense and the most worrisome IT threat, enterprises must develop and deploy zero-trust frameworks that take nothing for granted.
What Is Identity and Access Management?
Identity and access management solutions combine three key concepts to improve mobile security:
- Identification: Who’s requesting access? IAM tools first assess user claims of identity: Is the user entering a valid username? Where is the request coming from? When?
- Authentication: The most familiar form of authentication is password protection, but these knowledge-based techniques are easily undermined by determined attackers. As a result, additional authentication efforts such as biometric markers or physical tokens are often used.
- Authorization: Identification and authentication aren’t enough to grant access. IAM tools also do the work of evaluating authorization based on corporate rule sets around staff roles and project responsibilities: What specific assets and resources are employees authorized to use?
In isolation, each approach provides a measure of protection against potential mobile attacks. Together, they offer much more substantive security.
How to Implement Identity Access Management
When it comes to deploying IAM options at scale, organizations have two broad options: on-premises or in the cloud. Solutions such as the CA Identity Manager operate on-premises, providing companies complete control over identity conditions, requirements and assessments across device endpoints.