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A new study reveals that 87 per cent of businesses feel that employees using their personal devices for work is making security more challenging, yet many do not consider these challenges as high priority security concerns.
The research, conducted by F-Secure, found that only 29 per cent of the 1780 professionals surveyed provided mobile security for phones and tablets.
It seems many businesses have a general sense of a need for reliable security, but are often unable to connect that need with specific kinds of protection.
For example, the study found that 92 per cent agreed that managing security would become more of a priority in the next 12 months.
This problem was particularly pronounced in businesses with 25-199 employees, which lagged behind larger enterprises in protecting BYOD fleets and mobile devices in general.
According to Jarno Niemela, F-Secure’s security researcher, a failure to address the unique security needs of BYOD fleets represents a serious security gap in endpoint security that could expose companies to the very problems they’re trying to avoid.
“De-prioritising endpoint security, such as by neglecting the security needs of BYOD fleets, essentially avoids dealing with the risks caused by lax security policies and leaves companies open to the incidents they want to avoid,” said Niemela.
“Would you run a company PC that has access to email without endpoint security? Of course not. So why give insecure BYOD devices access to email or other company assets?”
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