NCSAM: Six Tips to Help Keep your Business Secure

During the last half of the 1990s, there was a concern for employees using their own home desktop computers to dial in to the corporate network from home. Thousands of articles and hundreds of conference sessions discussed the associated risks and then how to mitigate them through documented policies and the use of new tools.

Soon after the year 2000, these concerns expanded to employees using their personally owned laptops outside of the office and in other facilities instead of the corporate-issued computers. Thousands more articles and hundreds more conference sessions discussed how to address the risks.

Just a few short years later, smart phones started being widely used…thousands of more articles and hundreds of more sessions. And soon, employees were using not just one but multiple smartphones, tablets, laptops and wearables for not only personal activities but also for work activities.

The types of new technologies that employees are using within work environments and for business activities are going to continue to grow exponentially. Their personal data is getting more mixed in with the business data on those devices. How can organizations get ready for these increasingly high-tech employees? How can they keep the business data separate from the personal data? Can they even do this anymore?

There are increasingly complex ways in which employees are connected to…

1. the Internet;
2. directly to other individuals
3. Wi-Fi enabled objects that are passively collecting your mobile device exhaust, and/or images of you, as you pass by them;
4. unlimited numbers of unknown others slurping data through their mobile apps; and
5. growing numbers of other “smart” internet of things (IoT) devices that are automatically taking the data generated and passing it along to unlimited others.

This is complicated by the fact that these workers are increasingly doing work remotely, away from the (Read more...)