Protecting Company Data Is Getting Cheaper, But Is It Any Less Invasive?

The BYOD trend continues forward, and with it comes the need for security. Seven million dollars’ worth of mobile devices are lost or stolen every day in the United States, and now that those devices are becoming more and more the containers of sensitive company information, it’s a rising concern. This is where mobile device management (MDM) comes in. A remote method of keeping workplace information secure on smartphones and tablets that have fallen into compromising situations, MDM solutions is the answer that keeps coming up at companies that find the prospect of keeping manual tabs on every employee’s device nightmarish at best.

Osterman Research is reporting that not only is there an upward trend in confidential information being stored on the personal mobile devices of employees, but that the annual IT costs associated with managing each one is $399 per user.

3CX, inventors of the 3CX PBX phone system, calls those costs too high. This is one of the reasons the company has introduced its entry into the MDM market. It makes sense that a company that prides itself in providing a more manageable phone system to clients would want to provide mobile security of this sort, and by the looks of what it has to offer, it seems that 3CX has hit the mark.

The 3CX Mobile Device Manager is secure. It boasts an arsenal of privacy features, from complete remote control to the ability to wipe the SD card of a compromised device even if it isn’t connected to the Internet. IT administrators can install and manage new apps to a mass number of devices too, and it is all prepared for the BYOD revolution: 3CX Mobile Device Manager is cross-platform.

It’s a great help to IT administrators. There must be nothing more groan-inducing than coming to work in the morning and needing to go from co-worker to co-worker, asking for their phones and updating them with various apps and permissions. On the other side, though, comes the old problem of what the end-user is giving up for this security. Remote locking and wiping is great for compromised phones, but keep in mind: these are personal devices, too.

That is the entire reason BYOD is happening in the first place, because people like using their own devices (it is literally in the name). Affordable or not, a big question that subscribers to solutions like this are going to need to answer is how staff members are going to react to the invasiveness of MDM, and exactly what sort of policies are going to be put in place and enforced in order to make sure that the personal privacy of employees is respected.