Protect your corporate data on mobile devices

Much of what drives us to make mobile such an integral part of our daily lives is the convenience that it offers. It’s the ease of staying in touch, sharing with others, checking email, and accessing information from anywhere. Ironically, it’s those same conveniences that we rely on and expect from our smartphones that give mobile the potential to put corporate data at risk.

Symantec is announcing Mobility Suite 5.3 to extend data loss prevention technology to mobile devices. This release aligns to Symantec’s Unified Security strategy and will help organizations leverage the power of mobile while giving them the confidence that their sensitive information is protected. Symantec Mobility Suite 5.3 will become available for purchase later this month.

Many of our apps of convenience introduce an array of new data leakage vectors that organizations can’t afford to let go unchecked. Checking email, running corporate apps, downloading files, web browsing, file sharing, and printing while mobile help drive business productivity, but also create the opportunity for the unauthorized outbound flow of sensitive data.

You’ve probably invested a lot of time and resources in creating data loss prevention (DLP) policies for preventing sensitive data from leaving your corporate perimeter, but mobile typically runs beyond the reach of those perimeters and policies. To close down those data leakage vectors you need a way to easily extend your existing DLP policies to your users’ mobile devices.

Mobile device management (MDM) solutions can provide organizations a means to lock down mobile devices and enable network access via VPN for mobile devices, but MDM is not a popular option in an increasingly BYOD friendly environment. Users don’t want to hand control of their personal smartphones over to the organization. That user resistance can sometimes even be a problem with corporate issued devices.

Additionally, even though establishing a VPN between mobile devices and your corporate network has the potential to extend existing DLP policies beyond the corporate perimeter, using full device VPN to channel all of your users’ business and personal traffic through a VPN onto your corporate network can take a heavy toll on your network load, and ultimately your budget as you end up having to buy more nodes or build up infrastructure. Full device VPN can also create usability issues, as connecting to a VPN is perceived as an extra hoop for users to jump through just to get the information they need to get their job done.

Mobile application management (MAM) solutions can definitely help mitigate mobile data loss with their ability to prevent corporate data already on mobile devices from leaking to unauthorized cloud and mobile apps. But what about the data going from your corporate network to the mobile device? While MAM can get you part of the way, many companies want to continue to leverage their existing DLP policies that they have invested significant time in developing to monitor and prevent data from even getting onto mobile devices.

Symantec has integrated mobile application management capabilities with market-leading DLP product, allowing you to extend DLP to your mobile devices without requiring MDM or full device VPN. It leverages the apps that are secured via Symantec’s unique app wrapping technology and a secure app proxy that acts like a per-app VPN. When the DLP integration is enabled, the app proxy communicates with your DLP servers to inspect the traffic and appropriately apply policy. It leverages your existing DLP policies to shut down mobile data leakage vectors with its ability to monitor or completely block sensitive data from ever being downloaded to your mobile devices. And, it gives you and your security team a centralized approach to easily manage DLP across all your endpoints, including mobile devices.