Oops! Lost your smartphone or laptop? 

So what are you worried about: contacts, pictures or starting Candy Crush from Level 1 on your new phone? But, that is the least of your organizations concerns, they’re worried about the confidential e-mails, tenders and that million dollar idea that you have been working on for the last 4 months!

Your personal device is no longer just your loss but poses a serious threat of corporate espionage to your respective organization, and could affect the industry as a whole.

Welcome to the connected world, where companies are no longer confined geographical limitations. With access to company files, emails, and even projects from virtually anywhere, there is a greater need of secure communication across a city or a country or even a single continent. With globalization dictating terms for any successful business, collaboration with flexibility and ease for communication is imperative.

It was much simpler living in primitive times where all the data servers were deployed inside the organizational premises and IT admins kept control over devices used by employees, both hardware and software. However, with policies like Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) and data shifting from office premises to the cloud, it is becoming a challenge for the IT to keep a track of information. On top of that, with Dropbox  and Salesforce  becoming essential tools, it gets important for organizations to have a framework in place as these are 3rd party solutions over which the organization has less or no jurisdiction.

There has been an existing need in order to put a framework in place to make credible authentication and allow protocol driven access rights.

As simple as it may sound, there are a number of complexities to be taken into consideration. Some of the best examples are:

1. Would we require an extra level of authentication to access the information? Should there be controls to approve user access to sensitive information? Should identity claims or identity assurance procedure be in place?   

Or

1. Do we allow the user to login if the device is shifting IP address too frequently within a limited span of time

Or

1. Do we allow the user to login if the device is shifting IP to various geographical regions?

All these situations need to be treated as a serious threat to any organization. Cases of security breach make it mandatory for the IT division to focus on implementing measures to keep up with the changing times and technology.

In such cases, Avancer recommends to define a mobile access management governance and strategy framework that helps in ensuring that the user has the flexibility of securely accessing all the essential data on a variety of devices from any part of the globe. It helps companies to integrate their existing systems in a way that the IT admin can keep a track of and control the activities across the organization.

The image below explains why 70% of the organizations have implemented Mobile Access Management – Source Gartner.

Once IAM is in place, the user can access multiple services with just one set of credentials. This would make sure employees are able to access the right kind of services and soon making business independent of the kind of device the user has. So don’t worry as you can use the same credentials to sync your Candy Crush progress on Facebook and continue playing it on your phone or any new device with the same password. Magic!! Mobility we call it.