Security:

The Next Competitive Differentiator

It’s well established that businesses need to protect themselves from different sources and different types of threats. But it’s not just the portability and connectivity of smartphones and tablets that are exacerbating risks. While mobile devices have for all intents and purposes blown up the notion of a corporate network perimeter, threats now extend much further than devices: vulnerabilities, such as malware, direct attacks, data interception, exploitation, and social engineering, are evolving and remain a threat on endpoints in our hands, at our desks, on our networks, and in our service providers’ datacenters.

In addition to managing these attack vectors and ensuring that data is being properly encrypted,these attack vectors and ensuring that data is being properly encrypted, another critical component of any robust and comprehensive security solution requires clear oversight covering all mobile assets. These security support services ensure that organizations can quickly locate devices at all times, effectively manage these devices remotely – and quickly intervene when necessary – monitor data on these mobile endpoints and how they are being used. In a recent poll conducted by VDC Research retail technology investment decision makers identified security

capabilities as the leading criteria when evaluating retail solution providers are selected based on a variety of technical service and support capabilities that address

mobile platform support, lifecycle support, with a critical emphasis on cost of deployment and minimizing overall cost of ownership.

As mobile investments become ever more strategic to retail operations, requirements to support these solutions are predictably changing. Among retail decision makers, the mobility issues of greatest concern to them range from ensuring that mobile solution uptime is optimize to minimize any disruption to operations, delivering intuitive and user friendliness of mobile solutions and making sure that mobile support costs are minimized. Retailers are increasingly looking toward third party solution providers to deliver those mobile asset management and lifecycle support requirements.

This is precisely why the concept of defense-in-depth resonates and is widely practiced. While there are great tools to secure your networks, lock down devices, and even individual applications, more advanced security solutions will be

required – particularly once your organization becomes more reliant and sophisticated in the way it leverages mobility, modern operating systems (OSs), new applications, and new “things” that are being instrumented and connected with electronic tags and sensors. Finally, next-generation mobile security solutions have to ensure that the user experience is constant whatever the device.

Mobile security applications and services should be easy to use and not put too much burden on the end user.

From a retailer’s perspective security breaches also carry a very public face, directly impacting the organization’s reputation and include significant remediation costs to the business.

For example, the Target breach – which included the compromise of 100M customer records – at least in part contributed to a 46% YoY sales drop in the quarter following the incident.

While many of the organizations experiencing the most significant breaches over the last several years have been able to rebound, and most accept that creating an impenetrable shield is not realistic, retailers are clearly looking for solution providers that best address their security requirements and can efficiently respond when a breach does occur. This was supported by research conducted by VDC Research which identified “security capabilities” as by far the leading mobile retail solution provider selection criteria.

With the growing risk of security breaches, implementation of security best practices will represent a competitive differentiator for retailers moving forward. This means not only implementing a layered approach to security from the ground up. In addition – and perhaps even more important – is ensuring that if (or when) a breach occurs, the response is proactive and well managed.

7 Best Practices for Retail Mobile Security

1. High-volume registration: The ability to configure and register a high volume of users and devices at the same time through an easy-to-use and configure interface is important, especially when looking at the rapid scale at which organizations are registering mobile and other networked devices.

2. Application management: The average number of applications per user is scaling just as rapidly as the number of devices. Moreover, the apps are growing in complexity and size. Provisioning and managing these is taxing network traffic and has the potential to stall the management platform.

3. Infrastructure support: Direct and real-time integration with LDAP – that saves ongoing administrative time and cost – is critical. In addition, dedicated, VPN-like mobile application tunnels that secure app traffic end-to-end is essential.

4. OS management and support: The fluid nature of the mobile OS landscape requires a management platform that provides rapid support for all device, including other end points such as wireless peripherals. The nature of an increasing ‘employee-enabled’ OS change represents an additional wrinkle and support requirement.

5. Secure content management: Secure content distribution and mobile data leakage prevention (DLP) are increasing requirements, especially considering the increasing volume of more sensitive information and files being accessed and processed on mobile devices.

6. Layered approach to mobile security solutions: Mobile enablement introduces threats to enterprise IT that cannot be offset, mitigated, or prevented by a single technology solution. Combating those threats requires a layered approach to security to ensure the protection of corporate data

7. Mobile lifecycle support services: With limited IT resources many retailers’ turn to third party MMS providers to support their digital initiatives. From deployment services to mobile asset tracking, software/application management, retirement and upgrades, these providers offer comprehensive mobile lifecycle support solutions.