Wearable shipments are on track to grow tenfold over the next few years, reaching 150 million devices (and worth $19 billion) by 2018, according to Juniper Research. And as mobile devices continue to infiltrate everyday life, the consumer impact on enterprise environments poses a threat to organizational security. The Bring Your Own Anything (BYOx) movement has introduced a bevy of smartwatches, fitness trackers, smartphones and tablets into the workplace, tapping into corporate networks and exchanging data amongst personal and business accounts.

In response, organizations must implement effective BYOx security solutions to protect their intellectual property, as well as employee data. The challenges IT departments encounter with BYOx security include a solution’s scalability, remote control capabilities and effectiveness across multiple devices and operating systems. Today we hear from seven  industry experts on the best BYOx security solutions and how organizations can protect vital data from malicious individuals or entities.

5 experts share top services & tools for BYOx security

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Jordan Edelson, Founder and CEO, Appetizer Mobile

Blackberry has made an attempt to combat security risk with the launch of Blackberry Balance for OSX10, which splits the operating devices in two systems, with one profile for personal usage and one profile for work usage. Businesses can also utilize effective security solutions such as Samsung KNOX Workspace, which provides IT administrators with remote control of user devices and applications.

Putting MDM software in place will allow IT to scale BYOx security. These types of systems allow companies to administrate devices remotely, track and monitor the location of devices, and wipe the devices if need be.

I have found AirWatch and Soluto to be most effective in addressing BYOx security concerns.

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Adam Ely, Bluebox co-founder

Adam Ely, COO and Co-founder, Bluebox Security

Data Wrapping protects all corporate data, including email attachments, with document-level encryption and security policies that allow you to track, revoke or wipe data. AES 256 bit encryption will ensure that even if there is a data leak in BYOx, the data itself is secure.

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• Instant App Protect secures corporate data in any internal or public app on-demand; no SDKs or coding required. Not only does this free developer and IT time, it allows employees freedom to self-serve secure application access. Make sure that protection includes context aware policies to control data leakage on the mobile device, between apps, and over the network to cloud storage locations.

• Create self-defending apps. Select technologies that can convert existing apps into self-protecting apps against platform-level vulnerabilities, app tampering and jailbreaking/rooting so you no longer need to worry about whitelisting or blacklisting applications.

• Secure corporate data end-to-end — from your internal or cloud storage applications down to the mobile device. It’s not enough to just protect from attacks on the mobile threat surface, you also want to ensure security end-to-end.

• Separate corporate from personal data with flexible configurations.

• Privacy dashboards. Respect your employee’s need for privacy by fully disclosing to them what IT is, and just as importantly, isn’t able to track.

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BYOx is shifting the focus away from mobile device management and toward corporate data management. BYOx is completely changing the way companies look at security by focusing on the data rather than the device. Now, IT must find a way to monitor and secure data that runs through personally owned devices.

Emerging technology solutions that provide real-time visibility into mobile usage patterns can help facilitate the dialog between security/IT and lines of business. Once security/IT gains insights into how business is being transacted on mobile, they can tailor security policies and protocols to reduce the risk associated with those activities. These tools can also help a company stay current with emerging mobile use cases so they stay ahead of mobile threats to the business.

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Blake Brannon, Senior Solutions Engineer, AirWatch by VMware

The introduction of mobile devices in the enterprise and the consumerization of IT changed the security model for IT. Organizations can’t throw everything behind a firewall now. The post-PC era really shows the importance of using multiple layers of security that depend on the end user’s role in the organization and the information they access and collaborate on. With the pace of mobile innovation, organizations can no longer “set it and forget it,” but must regularly reevaluate new threats and opportunities that come with mobile enhancements. The key is to make enrolling in a BYOD program as easy and beneficial for the end user as possible.

AirWatch Workspace enables IT to containerize corporate data on an employee-owned device that maintains security for corporate data while keeping an employee’s personal data, apps, email and content separate. With AirWatch, IT admins set up policies based on smart groups or user groups customized to their specific company, which makes growing from 100 to 100,000 devices automatic.

In a BYOD environment, selecting a solution that is OEM agnostic (iOS, Android, Windows, BlackBerry, etc.) will increase employee adoption and IT control.

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David Jevans, Marble Security founder

David Jevans, CEO and Chief Technology Officer, Marble Security

Importantly, on BYOD devices, the explosion of apps on these devices can pose a huge risk to enterprises both from data loss, credential theft, APTs, spear phishing and mining by apps of corporate directories. These issues are not solved by the mobile operating systems, nor are they solved by Mobile Device Management (MDM) systems. Dynamic security is needed on mobile devices, just as it’s needed on PCs, servers and networks.

Recommended tools and services to solve BYOx security include:

• Mobile Device Management (MobileIron, Airwatch, IBM Maas360)
• Mobile Application Management (see above)
• Device Security (KNOX by Samsung for Android)
• App Risk Management (Marble Security, Appthority)
• Containers (Good Technologies, KNOX by Samsung)

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David Appelbaum Sr. VP of Marketing, Moka5

Since there is no real standard for BYOx implementation — it still remains a mix of VDI, MDM, DaaS, and other approaches — IT is forced to plug the holes that their platform of choice has not addressed and so may layer on multiple solutions — which of course runs counter to end-user and operational performance expectations in the first place. The bottom line is that BYO is still very much in its infancy regardless of the hype.

We highly recommend Moka5 as the best solution for BYO security, management, and end-user productivity. From our perspective using Moka5 is simply the most scalable and least intrusive method for managing and securing vast estates of BYO devices. Since we use a fully encrypted, locally executing secure container, we can manage 14,000 containers from a single, standard Intel duel processor server. This level of scalability is impossible for VDI — which can typically only support 50-100 images per server depending on size. We leverage the computing power of the host rather than the server so our solution is vastly more scalable by design.

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Cheryl Knight contributed to this article.

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