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Adaptive Trust - A New Defense for Secure Enterprise Mobility

in the Middle East

Summary: BYOD, cloud and the Internet of Things are changing enterprise defense plans
to guard against points of attack inside the network perimeter. These new ways of
connecting to secure resources have changed the way traditional threat radars work –
protecting threats from the outside.

An HR director, a salesperson visiting with your engineering team, and a network administrator
walk into office at 9am. Each is carrying a coffee in one hand, a smart phone in their pocket and
a laptop over the shoulder. Within minutes of entering the building, they all log in to the Wi-Fi
network and blend into the mobile workforce.

These tech-savvy, and Wi-Fi loving users expect to connect and work from anywhere on any
device – and they want connectivity without extraneous layers of security that slow them down.
It’s this workforce and expectations that are turning security inside out.

What’s happening faster than anyone imagined is the dilution of the fixed perimeter that
surrounds the enterprise. Before workforces went mobile, IT invested tons of time and
resources into building a crack-free perimeter that prevented outside threats from coming into
the enterprise. They locked down the network with gateway firewalls, intrusion prevention
systems, anti-spam, URL filtering and other security solutions to close off possible entry points.

But in our more mobile-centric world, the biggest threats now come from inside the network.
Infected laptops and smart phones walk right through the front door and connect directly to the
network without IT’s knowledge. When you count the attacks initiated from those unsecured
user devices, the loss of sensitive data on mobile devices and risky end user behavior, they add
up to more than 90 percent of enterprise security breaches.

Lost devices alone pose a serious insider threat. In 2014 thieves stole 2.1 million smartphones
in the United States and another 3.1 smartphones were lost. The missing devices are often all
someone needs to gain access to a company’s valuable data and critical business systems.
Remember the mobile workers from earlier? The HR director’s laptop could have access to the
direct deposit information for the entire company, and the network administrator most likely has
the credentials to access 70 percent of the systems in the company.

Stats are only beginning to trickle in that highlight the potential threat of the Internet of Things.
Clearly, billions of devices will connect to the Internet in the coming years, but how will they
impact the enterprise? According to The Internet of Things 2015 report, the largest adopter of
IoT ecosystems will be businesses, not consumers.

4 Cyber Warnings E-Magazine – July 2016 Edition
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