The Hybrid Digital Workforce: How to Maximize Security and Productivity
Where is your corporate data right now? Thanks to Covid accelerated trends, your data could be in cafes, coffee shops, riding public transit, or even at a late-night party. It’s traveling with your employees on their mobile devices.
This exponential rise in data through mobile use — and the increasing complexity of work patterns — is opening the door to more sophisticated threats. These threats can interfere with the need for ubiquitous access that organizations require, and employees expect. Thankfully, there are proven ways to secure the modern workforce.
In this blog, the first in a series on securing the Hybrid Digital Workplace, we discuss mobile security's role and present a way to analyze the solutions on the market to help define the best approach for your organization.
Pitfalls Around Secure Mobility
There are several mistakes organizations tend to make related to securing today’s digital and highly mobile workforce. Here are three we see quite frequently:
Lack of urgency: Too many organizations fail to see securing mobile devices as a critical strategic imperative. This increases the threat risk for devices, and data, and leaves organizations with an alarming gap in their cybersecurity posture. If security is not integrated from the beginning, it is often added as an afterthought or bundled with other solutions.
Failing to understand the scope of the problem: Each device is a potential target for hackers and jailbreakers and so is the data the device contains. This includes corporate-owned and regulated data, which can easily get co-mingled with personal data – including social media content, shadow IT cloud services and any number of apps. Corporate data must be kept secure from privacy-invading personal apps that most employees have on their mobile devices.
Controlled by complexity: Unfortunately, when organizations try to tackle the previous two challenges, many respond to each specific need in isolation and end up with point solutions that create a complicated and costly layering of security platforms. In most cases, this approach fails to address the core challenges of secure mobility.
The Toolkit Approach to a Secure Hybrid Workplace
Multiple definitions exist for the emerging blend of IT and security operations, and there are multiple tools as well. One way to simplify the options and understand the right fit for your organization is to think of security in terms of a toolkit.
Now consider the following question: What would a successful toolkit for a secure hybrid workplace look like in your environment?
To begin with, it goes beyond simply using technology to manage risk or keep up with trends. Instead, it emphasizes the effective use of people, technology, and processes. In addition, it includes an understanding of what to build on. In this case we believe it makes more sense to build on security than anything else, as it can traverse all endpoints, requiring fewer policies to manage. And the policies part of our toolkit must secure endpoints and protect users and data while maximizing user experience. We must reduce risk, but we cannot reduce productivity.
And this is where some tools become clearly problematic. Many bundled security solutions fail to maintain a balance because they are purpose-built for productivity, not security. Relying solely on these can lead to significant gaps in organizational defenses.
For example, VPNs or security following a baseline may not provide in-depth security, leading to potential gaps. One reason for this is the reliance on the native security provided in mobile vendor operating systems. If compromised, this can lead to data loss and downtime as the security of the OS and applications are interconnected.
However, there are tools that offer the right balance. They fill the security gaps left by bundled solutions and enhance productivity for the business. Based on what we’re hearing from our customers around the world, we can say that BlackBerry® Unified Endpoint Management (UEM) is one of these tools. Employees and administrators love to use it, and their reviews led BlackBerry to be recognized as a Customers’ Choice vendor for 2024, in the Gartner® Peer Insights™ for Unified Endpoint Management Tool category, two years running.
BlackBerry UEM is built from the ground up and offers built-in secure data transmission and storage, as well as patented elliptic curve cryptography. This enables secure productivity, true BYOD usage without compliance issues, and reduced dependence on OS vendor patches. A Unified Endpoint Management solution, such as BlackBerry UEM, is likely already part of your technology stack, with a focus on managing mobile devices, content, and applications.
UEM should also allow users to remain secure and protected from zero-day attacks. Mobile threat defense (MTD) is becoming increasingly necessary to meet these challenges and provide the right business outcomes that security and risk leaders need to offset the risks and meet compliance objectives, while ensuring productivity continues. With market-leading AI-based threat protection, BlackBerry UEM customers can leverage a built-in capability to meet these outcomes.
Hybrid Workplace Research – The Role of Analysts
When faced with technology choices to meet organizational outcomes, organizations of all sizes are subject to a wide array of tools and typically turn to the market to help guide them in their decision making.
Research analyst firms play a part as they prefer to define and apply categories that attempt to describe the approach, and often the tools, that they prescribe for a given set of use cases. They also like to compare how these vary in terms of capabilities – capabilities that administrators will ‘try’ and match with their use cases.
Too often the resultant research fails to focus on the outcomes sought by the IT operations and Security professionals and ends up doing nothing more than listing capabilities in a comparative fashion without the corresponding context of why and when these are relevant.
To illustrate why it is important to focus on outcomes and not merely choose tools arbitrarily from comparison tables in research documents, consider research that identifies the wider need for Digital Workplace Management to be considered holistically and not just in the context of individual tools and their respective capabilities.
One example is a report published by OMDIA’s team of analysts: “Hybrid Work Security and Management – 2022–27,” which provides subscribers with a fuller understanding of a range of underlying product categories including MTD, UEM, managed mobility services, Digital Experience Management, mobile security solutions and other tools and processes integral to flexible working.
This grouping of categories also aligns more readily with both the range of challenges and outcomes sought by IT Operations and Security leaders and, in turn, better reflects the holistic set of security tools and managed services provided by BlackBerry for its customers.
Conclusion
Whether you prefer the term Digital Workplace Management, which has come to the fore recently, or the term “Hybrid work security and management,” — both represent a way to describe the overarching approach needed to combine tools, processes, and services to achieve the full set of business outcomes desired. Both these definitions also aim to describe the risks and threats that are exposed in the full set of business use cases, device types and access methods that make up the hybrid working model.
BlackBerry not only espouses this approach, but also provides the security tools and outcomes needed to offset the risks and threats while preserving all the user experience, privacy and protection of personal data that staff expect, and regional compliance controls stipulate. BlackBerry is known for delivering these outcomes during its more than 25 years in secure mobility.
