How to Secure Enterprise Apps on the BYOD Model?

With the onslaught of COVID-19 crisis, businesses worldwide have been required to move to remote work or work from home. However, this working model has introduced a growing set of cybersecurity risks as remote employees often use local networks or internet connectivity. As a result, this has made BYOD (bring your own device) an essential IT model.

Enterpris          e applications are a software solution that provides business logic and tools to model entire business processes for organisations to improve productivity and efficiency. These include billing systems, customer relationship management systems and supplier relationship management systems. An enterprise app is one that can be used throughout an organisation to run multiple departments and business processes such as Oracle and SAP.

Enterprise app systems are regularly the central hub for a large variety of data arriving from a massive amount of sources. Therefore, they are useful for incorporating contact data validation and improvement solutions as one can guarantee all data, then entering the system is of high quality.

If employees will use enterprise mobile apps on their own phones, enterprise IT requires to make sure these apps are secure. After all, cybercriminals are well aware that valuable data is often stored unencrypted on smartphones. Those data need to be safeguarded.

IT needs to protect data without compromising employee privacy at the same time. The challenge is many enterprise mobility management platforms are fairly intrusive. Organisations certainly need a mobile data protection solution to prevent valuable assets, sensitive information, and intellectual property from falling into the wrong hands.

Considering potentially catastrophic reputation damage and the legal consequences that can arise from just a single breach, an entire data protection solution isn't optional, it's mandatory.

Ensuring User Privacy with Enterprise Security

In today's economic environment, it's unlikely that many enterprises that haven't already supplied their employees with company smartphones will do so soon. It creates a seemingly intractable for IT that pits employee privacy against enterprise security.

Enterprise IT should change its focus to untie this knot. Instead of trying to secure employees' devices, IT should focus on securing the enterprise apps employees will use. They need to encrypt and protect all data and provide authentication and VPN capabilities directly inside their mobile apps to reinforce the connection to back-end servers and control the applications without a device management console.

The data that apps store locally on the device must be encrypted. Without encryption, malware can easily access and steal information. So, it's essential to use the right form of encryption. Older encryption standards are now known to have critical flaws or have been cracked by researchers.

When it comes to authentication, organisations need to deliver easy and familiar workflows inside mobile apps. However, they are not built typically to authenticate to the same corporate ecosystems used by desktops or by the same methods used by other apps.

IT enterprises also need to implement the ability to control the app and its data, with the ability to revoke access and delete information involved with it if required.

Mentioned security functions can be implemented manually or through the integration of software development kits (SDKs) as long as the enterprise has access to the source code. In many cases, that's not possible, and manual development of security features is expensive and time-consuming. In these circumstances, no-code platforms that fuse new functionality directly to the binary can offer a quick means to secure enterprise apps for employees on a BYOD model.

On a BYOD model, security or employee privacy will not necessarily be compromised. If IT focuses on ensuring security for enterprise applications, employees can safely work with corporate and personal data on the same device, stimulating productivity and performance.