Technology & IT | Saturday 20 June, 2015 5:39 pm |

The rise in risk for organizations adapting to flexible working ecosystems


Today’s working environment is considerably more fluid and flexible that is has ever been. There are ever-increasing options that allow employees to stay connected to their working environment with whatever device they should choose. Though this provides a greater degree of adaptability and collaboration for employees across offices and geographies, it also leads to new data security challenges for the company.

The growth of Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) has increased significantly in recent years. In the MENA region, it is expected to grow from USD 11.1 billion in 2013 to USD 38.03 billion by 2019, according to a report by MicroMarket Monitor. And whilst this provides a much more dynamic and global approach for organizations, allowing their workforce to collaborate on a much wider scale, it inevitably opens up new portals for cyber threats, where sufficient precautions must be put in place to monitor and pre-empt any potential risks.

BYOD, and other new flexible working environments, such as virtualization, and the growing use of public and private clouds, brings with it challenges that continue to cause concern to companies globally. Governance and compliance are integral to the concerns, as the wider the IT ecosystem, the more open it becomes to cyber threats and attacks, malware and data leakage or loss.
It can take just one employee to breach regulations, trust, intellectual property and other critical business obligations for this door to be opened for cyber criminals.

Bring Your Own…Security Breaches

It is inevitable, that as mobile devices continue to evolve they will further penetrate the working environment. It is therefore important that employees, from the C-suite executives to the intern or graduate are aware of the risks and how these can influence strategic business decisions. Unmanaged BYOD schemes can lead to a loss of control, bringing additional impact on data loss.

Individuals and organizations – large and small – also continue to have only one or two security process in place. Whether it’s a password, PIN, or fingerprint scan, which are the most common types of security for devices these are the most simple to decode for cyber criminals.

One in five Middle East organizations report being the victim of economic crime and cybercrime. Such crime ranks, for the first time, as the second most reported economic crime in the Middle East. Compared globally, where it is it sits in fourth position.

This is a fast growing industry, impacting profit, assets and reputation. But with every challenge comes an opportunity, and this has led technology firms to create solutions that can support organizations in their fight against cyber threats and bring a new dimension of security framework to the virtual world. Mobile Device Management (MDM) is often used in this regard as an enforcement tool, which sets policies on how BYOD is managed in offices.

In this world of integrated technology, security platforms, such as the Samsung KNOX, have proven to be necessary in bringing enhanced security through the protection of the integrity of the entire device, from the hardware to the application layer. We designed KNOX to protect device infrastructure with a multilevel approach to security that transcends the mere password or PIN approach and provides continuous integrity monitoring. This additionally eliminates compromise to the operating system and enables users to monitor and control devices on their network across multiple mobile service providers. Also helping employers to keep in control of their data regardless of where their employees are accessing and using it from.

Platforms, such as Samsung Knox, already exist to help protect both the individual and organizations against cyber threats. These technologies are being continually evolving in order to eradicate the dangers that BYOD and the mixture of business and personal devices on the future working environment. We must learn together how to ensure that businesses can thrive in an environment where cyber-crime can most certainly not.

About Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd.
Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd. inspires the world and shapes the future with transformative ideas and technologies, redefining the worlds of TVs, smartphones, wearable devices, tablets, cameras, digital appliances, printers, medical equipment, network systems, and semiconductor and LED solutions. We are also leading in the Internet of Things space through, among others, our Smart Home and Digital Health initiatives. We employ 307,000 people across 84 countries with annual sales of US $196 billion. To discover more, please visit our official website at www.samsung.com and our official blog at global.samsungtomorrow.com