final thought
A breach of privacy?
A recent study on the use of agent-
based mobile security found that
only 44% of employees would
accept having MDM or MAM
installed on their personal devices.
The report also found that the
majority of employees choose
not to enrol in their employer’s
BYOD programme because of
privacy concerns. Finding a balance
between employee satisfaction and
security used to be the conundrum
of BYOD: IT teams could either
see too much, or too little, of their
employee’s daily activities.
The same study found that
more than two thirds of employees
“Only 44% of
employees
would
accept
having MDM
or MAM
installed
on their
personal
devices.”
said they would agree to a BYOD
programme where the solution
just protected company data and
could not view, alter or delete
private data, such as photos or
apps. Such a solution would aim
to offer the IT team complete
visibility and control over corporate
data on BYOD, without impacting
employee privacy and productivity.
It is perhaps not so surprising
that such ‘agentless’ mobile
security solutions are quickly
gaining adoption in the enterprise,
with Gartner predicting that by
2018, “more than half of all bring
your own device (BYOD) users
that currently have an MDM agent
will be managed by an agentless
solution.” Unlike the MDM/MAM
alternative, security solutions that
do not rely on a software agent
installed on the device itself can
be set up so that they only monitor
corporate data.
If left unmanaged, BYOD
policies can create a lot of risks
to corporate data. Previously,
IT teams have had to take an
‘all or nothing’ approach to how
they manage BYOD, but the rise
of these agentless solutions
means that IT teams can finally
establish a middle ground
between data security and
employee satisfaction.
October 2017 | 47