Bumper year for gifted tablets and smartphones putting pressure on businesses to accommodate
The turkey has been consumed, the Christmas presents opened and the New Year has begun. For IT managers, the New Year may bring a new headache as they return to the office—getting a handle on all the new smartphones and tablets that employees received as holiday gifts and now want to use for work. Zenprise®, Inc., the leader in secure mobile device management (MDM), has just the cure—guidelines and a BYOD Tool Kit to help enterprises manage the unprecedented flood of gifted smartphones and tablets now in offices and workplaces across the globe.
Research published this week revealed that a massive 20 million new devices were activated over the festive period with a staggering 6.8 million first connected on Christmas Day. And since 67% of workers* use at least one of their own devices for work purposes, there's no doubt that many of these will enter the workplace environment, proudly adorning their owners' desks but causing potential nightmares for the IT department.
As a result the workplace will no doubt be rife with employees expecting to access company email and applications on their new devices. And the IT department will be expected to take responsibility for setting them up, becoming either the "bad guy" if it gets blocked, or the hero if they find an easy way to manage it.
Ahmed Datoo, CMO for Zenprise, sums up the challenge: "The ability to do more work on a mobile device, whether it is a smartphone or tablet, is a great benefit for both employees and companies. Using one mobile device for both work and personal business can open the door for great productivity improvements if the device is appropriately managed and secured."
To help IT managers manage this onslaught of employee-owned smartphones and tablets, Zenprise provides guidelines and a BYOD Tool Kit for protecting the mobile enterprise.
Zenprise Guidelines for Protecting the Mobile Enterprise
Truly protecting mobile enterprises requires an end-to-end mobile security strategy. Device security is no longer enough. Security threats can occur at the network, application and data layers. The following guidelines should help CIOs and IT administrators embrace enterprise mobility in a way that keeps their company secure and compliant:
- Discover rogue devices
- Define and communicate the company mobile strategy, including which users and devices will be supported, and which applications will be mobilized
- Get all mobile devices under management
- Set configuration and security policies in a role and policy based manner, according to corporate and regulatory policies and security use cases
- Monitor for mobile threats, potential data leakage and compliance violations
- Identify sensitive corporate data and lock it down with mobile DLP policies and controls
Zenprise BYOD Tool Kit
The BYOD Tool Kit from Zenprise includes:
- Zenprise Rogue Mobile Devices Assessment. A no-cost, no-install assessment to identify unmanaged mobile devices on your corporate network
- Zenprise Enterprise Mobility Executive Checklist. A checklist for technical and non-technical executives to help them guide their organizations to successfully roll out a BYOD program
- Zenprise Security Framework and Whitepaper. A whitepaper that offers enterprise mobility professionals a framework for ensuring mobile security, as well as a "top 10" requirements list for mobile security evaluators
- Zenprise BYOD Service. A Zenprise post-sale professional services engagement to help customers plan, design, and implement a BYOD program that is tailored to their needs and requirements
LANDesk’s Mobility Manager 9 meets the demands of an ever-changing mobile workforce with new policy-based features, expanded OS support and an application portal
LANDesk Software, a global leader in integrated systems lifecycle management and endpoint security, announced LANDesk Mobility Manager 9, extending the management and security reach of LANDesk’s integrated management offering to include one of the industry’s most complete mobile device management and security solutions with the incorporation of new features such as device connection control and policy configuration across the most popular platforms.
With the release of Mobility Manager 9, LANDesk supports the most popular mobile device platforms, including the latest iOS, Android and Blackberry operating systems. It allows custom device policy options, enabling IT to centrally define a policy and distribute it over a variety of platform types. By expanding the platform support to include the latest operating systems and custom device policy options, LANDesk Mobility Manager 9 delivers flexibility to the user while giving IT departments more control over their IT environment via a single management console and database – enabling greater ease of management and security.
Unlike many current solutions on the market, LANDesk Mobility Manager 9 provides the ability to display all discovered devices – PC, laptop, mobile, virtual and servers running on a variety of operating systems – in a single management console. The new solution also includes the LANDesk application store, a portal to access business documents, IT recommended applications and resources. Users can access content on their own, such as corporate files or purchased apps, through the application store portal. Any download requests can be approved by IT first, before making their way to a horizontal app store via integration with LANDesk’s award-winning business process engine.
“As enterprises adapt to an increasingly mobile workforce, it’s becoming more important to offer IT teams solutions to easily implement policies across a wide variety of platforms,” said Steve Daly, President and CEO, LANDesk Software. “LANDesk Mobility Manager allows IT managers to easily distribute mobile policies, making IT feel more secure in their corporate environment while continuing to allow users to leverage new technologies such as iPads, iPhones and Android devices. By merging mobility and systems management, LANDesk delivers the security IT managers seek in a corporate landscape of increasing user-purchased devices.”
The proliferation of mobile devices into business environments has created headaches for security-minded IT departments everywhere. LANDesk aims to give system administrators more peace of mind with the launch of LANDesk Mobility Manager 9, with the integration of complete mobile device management with the award-winning systems management solution, LANDesk Management Suite. This announcement follows on the heels of LANDesk’s development work with Lenovo to provide systems management and user provisioning for the new Lenovo ThinkPad Tablet, the market’s first enterprise-class tablet device.
“The LANDesk/Lenovo collaboration enables our customers to effectively manage applications, data and devices from a single management console. When designing the ThinkPad Tablet, we took everything into account - the user experience, business and productivity features for the workplace and security and manageability for IT managers,” said Peter Gaucher, Executive Director of Software and Content Services, Lenovo. “Working with LANDesk, the ThinkPad Tablet makes IT management simple, allowing the tablet to easily fit into a company’s ecosystem of technology devices.”
LANDesk Mobility Manager’s discovery capabilities feature integration with Microsoft ActiveSync and Blackberry Enterprise Server (BES) systems, allowing the capture of devices at the point of entry. Once a device has been discovered and recognized in the network, IT managers are capable of blocking specific devices from corporate data, if they pose a threat. Remote wiping capabilities are available for devices that are out-of-policy, non-compliant, active threats, lost or stolen or at the time of a user’s employment termination.
LANDesk Mobility Manager 9 features:- Expanded Platform Support: LANDesk Mobility Manger 9 provides premium support for all iOS and Android platforms.
- Device Connection Policy: With employees continuing to bring new, unsecured devices into the workplace, IT has the option to prevent unmanageable or unsupported devices from connecting to the corporate network or to choose specifically which devices may have access – all through one interface.
- Device Enrollment: Setting up new devices to be enrolled in the company system can easily be done by adding them to the user’s profile, which applies the user’s existing configuration and policy options, as well as installs the management agent on the new device.
- Device Configuration/Security Policy: Configuring email, VPN and WiFi capabilities are done in conjunction with a security policy, which IT can use to set locks, password strength requirements, screen timeout limits and more. This policy can be easily updated if the end-user’s capability requirements expand or become more restricted.
- Remote Management: When incidents occur that could potentially compromise the security of the corporate network, IT can remotely locate the device in question, locking, unlocking, wiping or resetting its password.
- Application Management: LANDesk’s application store is a self-service software distribution repository where enterprise resources such as apps, files, videos and other corporate resources can be accessed. The application store provides enterprises with a centralized source for providing corporate resources that can be accessed at the user’s discretion.
Whitepaper Outlines the Recommended Security Controls for Federal Information Systems and Organizations and Related Steps Toward Gaining FISMA Compliance
Cyber-Ark® Software, the leading global information security provider for protecting and managing critical applications, identities and sensitive information, released an informative whitepaper for federal agencies, “Complying with National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Special Publication (SP) 800-53.” With a special focus on establishing a proactive, preventative approach to privileged account management, the paper details how to implement the necessary controls described within NIST 800-53 to achieve FISMA compliance.
NIST 800-53 provides federal information systems and agencies with the recommended security controls to ensure ongoing situational awareness of the security of their IT systems. Cyber-Ark’s whitepaper was developed in conjunction with the increased focus that NIST 800-53 has placed on instilling controls to combat insider threats and the abuse of privileged accounts, while drawing attention to some of the shortcomings of traditional encryption-based approaches. In particular, it focuses on steps organizations can take to better manage across the privileged account management lifecycle, gain better control over shared accounts and institute real-time continuous monitoring solutions as part of a comprehensive risk management framework.
An Overview of Primary Security Controls and the Privilege Connection
While some aspects of Privileged Identity Management may be addressed procedurally, the majority of the necessary security controls outlined in NIST 800-53’s recommendations require a dedicated solution for the proactive management and audit of privileged users. Cyber-Ark’s Privileged Identity Management Suite and Privileged Session Management Suite enable an organization to execute the following controls to securely provide users and applications with the privileges needed in order to complete their role - and their role only:
Access Control:
As the foundation for the management of users and accounts, this control addresses the creation and assignment of privileges. According to NIST 800-53’s recommendations, particular attention must be paid to privileged accounts and their elevated access rights to the sensitive information stored in a variety of information systems. Cyber-Ark emphasizes the importance of controlling access across the privileged account lifecycle, encompassing steps for auto-discovery, management, policy definition and monitoring.
Audit and Accountability:
As NIST 800-53 suggests, this set of controls is critical when establishing a proactive approach to audit compliance and accountability. As detailed in the guidelines, auditable information must be available on demand. Without these built-in controls to continuously access sensitive information, log and monitor privileged actions, organizations will sacrifice accountability and fail to satisfy compliance requirements. Cyber-Ark’s Digital Vault provides tamper proof audit and log retention which is critical for ensuring the authenticity and safe keeping of all privileged audit information.
Identification and Authentication:
This control, according to NIST 800-53, asserts that “the information system uniquely identifies and authenticates organizational users.” This is especially critical for privileged and shared accounts - commonly utilized among the IT staff, diminishing an organization’s accountability while exposing password vulnerabilities. This control will establish a more effective password management program and accountability for shared accounts.
“With each release, NIST guidelines detail the most critical security controls that must be implemented to mitigate security vulnerabilities. With NIST 800-53, it is clear that privileged account management is moving to the top of the risk assessment priority list for many organizations,” said Adam Bosnian, Executive Vice President, Americas and Corporate Development, Cyber-Ark Software. “Combining the negative financial impact associated with non-FISMA compliance with rising internal and external threat awareness in the federal sector, this whitepaper provides specific advice organizations can use to enhance existing security solutions through policy-based automation and enhanced security controls around privileged account management.”
The NIST 800-53 whitepaper also describes applicable Cyber-Ark solutions to establish NIST 800-53 controls through a preventative approach to information security. Cyber-Ark provides several federal agencies with industry-leading solutions that protect critical assets, identify potential security vulnerabilities and mitigate risks by proactively managing and monitoring privileged accounts and activities.About Cyber-Ark
Cyber-Ark® Software is a global information security company that specializes in protecting and managing privileged users, applications and sensitive information to improve compliance, productivity and protect organizations against insider threats and advanced external threats. With its award-winning Privileged Identity Management, Sensitive Information Management and Privileged Session Management Suites, organizations can more effectively manage and govern data center access and activities, whether on-premise, off-premise or in the cloud, while demonstrating returns on security investments. Cyber-Ark works with more than 900 global customers, including more than 35 percent of the Fortune 100. Headquartered in Newton, Mass., Cyber-Ark has offices and authorized partners in North America, Europe and Asia Pacific.
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