VDC’s mobile team recently published its annual security report. The Report, titled “Mobility Spurs Security Ecosystem Expansion”, details how the adoption of mobility in corporate setting has—for all intents and purposes—blown up the notion of a corporate network perimeter. Threats now extend much further than devices: vulnerabilities, such as malware, direct attacks, data interception, exploitation, and social engineering are all evolving and remain a threat on endpoints in our hands, at our desks, on our networks, and within the data centers of our service providers.
Our research showed an uptick in the number of companies that are engaging with third parties for consultation, services, and technology to improve their security posture and hygiene, specifically in the areas of intrusion detection and incident response. However, as depicted below, there are many factors that are (and will continue to) contribute to the demise of the perimeter.
The Demise of the Perimeter
These elements are weakening the security postures of even the most aggressive investors in mobile and data security. This is primarily due to the shifts in how most of us now work and conduct business, both internally and externally, with our partners and customers. Due to degradation of the perimeter, organizations should now shift their focus to:
EMM Not Enough
Most enterprises have rightly focused on securing the smartphones and tablets they support as they deploy new mobile applications and further leverage mobile solutions to modernize and elevate mobility’s role in their organizations. EMM solutions have clearly helped, but organizations must do more and accept that their investments in these deployments are just the first steps in the evolution of their security infrastructures. In fact, our data showed that 39% of large organizations (>1,000 employees) have deployed an EMM solution; however, many companies have yet to expand their solution beyond basic mobile device management (MDM). EMM vendors are competing very well with traditional security vendors (e.g., IBM, Intel Security, Palo Alto Networks, and Symantec) by successfully partnering and integrating with a broad spectrum of best-of-breed security vendors. EMM vendors have been effective in leveraging their mobile-first acumen/mindset, brand strength, and large enterprise customer bases and are clearly being more aggressive and speedy in forging these partnerships. The partnerships are helping EMM vendors pivot to security solution providers; but enterprises have to go further, as their users’ behavior continues to evolve and their application range expands.
Vendors that we profiled in our report included: Apperian, Arxan, Better, Bitglass, BlackBerry, Blue Cedar Networks, Citrix, Entrust, IBM, Microsoft, Netskope, Okta, Oracle, Proofpoint, Pulse Secure, Samsung, Signal Sciences, Vera, VMware/AirWatch, Zimperium, and Zscaler. We also profiled several IoT Security vendors, these included: Bastille, Intel Security (McAfee), Mocana, and Wurldtech.
View the 2017 Enterprise Mobility & Connected Devices Research Outline to learn more.