Driving Tablets to the Workplace

The adoption of tablets in enterprise environments is gaining traction. With the release of the new Microsoft tablet and talks of an iPad Mini scheduled to be released this fall, there is new attraction to the term BYOD. There are however, underlying security risks that executives need to take into consideration. The convenience of tablets are no longer an attraction to just the consumer market. Forrester predicts tablet sales to rise to 375M in 2016 with 760M tablets globally – a third of these are predicted to be businesses purchases. The analyst firm also states that Apple iPad sales are estimated to increase 68 percent this fiscal year alone. Enterprises have begun to see the value of workers embracing the visibility and ease of accessing information to help promote the spread of elicit knowledge throughout their networks. And let’s not forget the cost savings of implementing a BYOD policy. On the flipside, there are security risks that are inevitable in such scenarios. With further personal device proliferation, the landscape for malicious attackers increases exponentially. Companies that want to implement a BYOD policy don’t want to sacrifice their level of security and let critical assets become compromised. If you know that company culture is expected to change causing security risks, what is an IT department to do? In order for security measures to stay competitive, they must follow suit by leveraging processes that can drill down the latest known, unknown and zero-day vulnerabilities. Protection must be 24/7 and regularly updated with the latest security information to evolve with the changing threat landscape. It is essential for IT pros to be able to discover, prioritize and fix weaknesses quickly. Leveraging a centralized solution to maximize visibility and reaction time is going to be the deciding factor to what prevents the attack.