Cybercrime is now expected to cost companies $10.5 trillion annually by 2025. Cybersecurity events can cause data leaks and breaches that could cost your business a significant amount of money.
To ensure your business’ growth isn’t stalled by losses due to security incidents, you must invest in tools and software to strengthen your physical and cyber security strategy.
Keep reading to learn about MDM software, what it can do for your business, and how to align it with your existing cyber and physical security strategy.
What Is MDM?
MDM is mobile device management, which refers to software to monitor, manage, and secure mobile devices such as laptops, mobile phones, and tablets. MDM can be useful for small and large enterprises and businesses that use mobile technologies in daily operations, such as security management and remote working.
Mobile device management operates using components housed in a data center:
- The server component – IT teams and administrators use this component to transmit policies through a management console.
- The client component – this is the component responsible for receiving and implementing the commands on end-user devices.
Older MDM systems encountered issues regarding scalability. However, in recent years, MDM software has been adapted and evolved to automatically detect new devices on the system and transmit policies and commands.
Suppose your business is hybrid, or you are using a bring-your-own-device policy. In that case, you should consider investing in MDM software to establish policies and regulations for user activity on your network.
The right MDM software can also be instrumental in ensuring the efficacy of a security system that operates using cloud-based, remote, and mobile technologies. Keep reading as we discuss the significant benefits of MDM software in line with your security strategy
How To Strengthen Your Business’ Cyber And Physical Security Strategy Using MDM
Enforcing your business’ cyber and physical security strategy with MDM can ensure no incidents involving third parties gaining access to your system. Here we will cover some of the best ways to use MDM to strengthen your business’ cyber and physical security strategy.
Enforcing Access Control In Physical And Cyber Security Levels
Access control is vital to ensuring that unauthorized users cannot gain entry to the premises, which will contain sensitive data and company assets.
You can implement access control internally throughout your building to enforce a zero-trust policy concerning your physical security. Zero-trust is a cybersecurity policy that does not assume the trustworthiness of every user on the system, only granting them permissions to necessary data and restricting their access to more confidential data.
To implement a zero-trust physical security strategy in your office building, you can install commercial door locks, mainly to protect rooms and spaces housing servers and sensitive data. This way, you can mitigate the occurrence of an internal security breach.
Similarly, using MDM can help you to apply a zero-trust policy across the mobile capabilities of your cloud-based security system. Different functions of your security system will be password-protected, ensuring that system administrators and security staff only have permissions to access the security features they need and nothing more.
MFA On Mobile Devices To Verify The Credential Users’ Identity
MDM can help you to enforce MFA (multi-factor authentication) across all company devices. Multi-factor authentication is a powerful tool at your disposal to merge cyber and physical security concepts. To prevent unauthorized users from gaining access to mobile devices on your system, you can implement multi-factor authentication using MDM software.
Company laptops, smartphones and tablets will be inaccessible for users without providing several sources of information to verify their identity. This could be password protection, facial recognition, fingerprint scanning, or voice recognition.
MFA plays a critical role in protecting company data and the data of users on the system. Without MFA in place, your employees’ and clients’ data will be more vulnerable to cyber attempts to steal personal information.
MFA is relatively easy to implement and is intuitive and user-friendly, which means that it won’t interfere with the usability of your system or inhibit the productivity of your staff.
Integrating Physical Access Control And Identity Verification
MDM is useful in helping to enforce that multi-factor authentication is used on a company phone before users attempt to gain access to the system. Once this process is complete, MDM can help you to enforce user identity certification at your building’s entrance.
Physical access control has one major vulnerability – the potential for misappropriated access credentials to be used to gain access to your building. Assessing your system’s vulnerabilities and resolving them is essential to ensure that your business does not suffer losses due to a breach.
The solution to the vulnerability of an access control system is to integrate identity verification and a video camera feed. The ability to add another layer of security with identity verification through video reinforces access control models and policies such as mandatory, discretionary, rule-based, and role-based strategies. With a video intercom smart reader, your system will have built-in voice recognition, high-definition video, and a touchless access reader.
By integrating access control with video feed, you will be able to remotely view access logs alongside video feed information on one user-friendly interface. Without incorporating these technologies, you would have to correlate data from two different sources using timestamps, which could be time-consuming.
By integrating identity verification software with your access control and video surveillance system, you can ensure that the identity of all users is determined before they gain access to the building. This is a two-factor authentication process applied to physical security, drawing from effective cybersecurity practices to solidify your physical security strategy.
Stricter Identity Verification For On-Premise Cyber Related Technology
MDM software can help you ensure that employees are on-site while using the technology, and it can help you verify their identity. In this case, MDM will ensure that users are only using company-approved devices to access sensitive company information.
Since cyber-attackers often hack into the system from an off-site location without using a company device, this protection is vital. Data breaches are extremely costly for businesses, and taking steps to secure your business from cyberattacks is a worthy investment to avoid incurring these costs.
Summary
MDM is a software that can help you to enforce policies across the company and personal devices in your cloud-based system. MDM facilitates multi-factor authentication and identity verification processes in your physical security system to ensure that only authorized users can access your system using company devices or personal devices. Bear these tips in mind when developing and assessing your existing security strategy.
