infoTECH Feature

May 26, 2015

The Gap Between Enterprise Security and Employee Actions

According to recent research from SOTI (News - Alert), there is a serious gap between the precautions businesses take to protect their data and the actions their employees take with company data.

SOTI knows all about the protection of data because it provides businesses with software for enterprise mobility and device management, so its finding that more than 60 percent of surveyed businesses have experienced a breach of data may have given it pause. Even though security companies do their best to make sure businesses are safe, they cannot control every action employees take. It is those actions that are at the root of such breaches, and SOTI's research showed that 73 percent of consumers have accessed corporate data from public Wi-Fi, 65 percent forwarded work documents to personal email addresses, and 65 percent have used personal cloud storage for work documents.

To combat those threats, SOTI CEO Carl Rodrigues (News - Alert) stated, it will take an effort on the part of IT to figure out how employees actually use their personal devices and how corporate strategy can help reduce the sorts of risk-taking behaviors listed above.

“With the number of connected devices that will increasingly link to corporate networks, IT needs to proactively build their arsenal of defenses to protect from the new frontier of enterprise threats,” Rodrigues said. “Part of that arsenal needs to be an understanding of how employees actually utilize their mobile devices and the behaviors they actually engage in that put the business, the network, and corporate data and apps at risk.”

He continued by mentioning that the scenario in which businesses find themselves is subject to corporate officials being proactive. It may seem perilous to continue to act in the face of employee actions – which often appear unpredictable – but conversations between IT and employees can give security personnel a good idea of how to make it easier for employees to fit into company policies.

If it is easy to log into company networks from secure Web portals, utilize secure corporate email for work functions, and utilize documents held in the corporate cloud, employees should be less likely to use other, non-secure means of completing work-related tasks.

The data behind this situation suggests that, since 60 percent of businesses have been able to prevent data breaches but only 50 percent of businesses have mobile strategy, prevention stands to increase with a subsequent increase in mobile strategies. Companies can find out what their employees want in a security plan and work around those ideas. IT will not be able to acquiesce with everything that employees put forth, but even a little bit of cooperation could take businesses far toward the overarching goal of protecting themselves.




Edited by Maurice Nagle
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