A company’s digital technology is no longer just the concern of IT staff – it has become an integral part of the employee experience. Pieter Engelbrecht, business unit manager at Aruba, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise Company, explains why it has become essential for HR managers to be engaged with mobile tech.
For instance, an HR director, a salesperson visiting with your engineering team and a network administrator walk into the office at 9am. Each is carrying a coffee in one hand, a smart phone in their pocket and a laptop over their shoulder. Within minutes of entering the building, they all log in to the Wi-Fi network and blend into the mobile workforce.
These tech-savvy, Wi-Fi loving users expect to connect and work from anywhere on any device – and they want connectivity without extraneous layers of security that slow them down. It’s this workforce and its expectations that are turning security inside out.
What’s happening faster than anyone imagined is the dilution of the fixed perimeter that surrounds the enterprise. Before workforces went mobile, IT invested tons of time and resources into building a crack-free perimeter that prevented outside threats from coming into the enterprise.
They locked down the network with gateway firewalls, intrusion prevention systems, anti-spam, URL filtering and other security solutions to close off possible entry points. But in our more mobile-centric world, the biggest threats now come from inside the network.
Infected laptops and smart phones walk right through the front door and connect directly to the network without IT’s knowledge. When you count the attacks initiated from those unsecured user devices, the loss of sensitive data on mobile devices and risky end user behaviour, they add up to more than 90 percent of enterprise security breaches.
Lost devices alone pose a serious insider threat. The missing devices are often all someone needs to gain access to a company’s valuable data and critical business systems. Remember the mobile workers from earlier? The HR director’s laptop could have access to the direct deposit information for the entire company, and the network administrator most likely has the credentials to access 70 percent of the systems in the company.