ERP goes Mobile

In the recent times, we’ve seen several big enterprises take the alleyway towards the app economy. This has caused a paradigm shift in how large corporations look at their business models today. By embracing the app culture, these enterprises are now looking at the bigger picture, where they’re aware of the huge scale benefits that mobility solutions have to offer. This not only gives them a  competitive edge but also helps them in improving their performance through efficient resource planning that reduces wastage and increases the overall productivity.

Mobile Enterprise Resource Planning (Mobile ERP) solutions help large corporations streamline business processes, keep track of inventory, interact with customers on time, manage human resources and ultimately, boost business revenues. No wonder mobility in ERP is a revolutionary move for the industry. In fact, it’s the perfect coming together and utilization of the ERP software and a Mobile workforce. Mobile ERP has made it possible to have huge amounts of data on the go. This progress has been fuelled by the availability of well-designed mobile apps and devices that are fully equipped to manage such huge amounts of data.

Business Data Breach Concerns

However, this all-time access to large databases on mobile devices has also given rise to concerns about data Security.

Be it an enterprise from the pharmaceutical industry, or, retail industry, protecting their sensitive data from hackers is a top priority. For example, pharmaceutical data contains crucial information about drug recipes or cooking process, so, a situation of data theft could imply huge losses for a pharmaceutical enterprise. Similarly, a financial enterprise will always require a solid security cover to ensure the complete protection of bank account details of customers from the attack of hackers.

According to the IBM sponsored study, 2016 Cost of Data Breach Study that was independently conducted by the Ponemon Institute, the average consolidated total cost of a data breach turns out to be $4 million. In addition to that, the cost incurred for each lost or stolen record containing sensitive and confidential information was reported to increase from a consolidated average of $154 to $158. Going beyond the cost data, the global study puts the likelihood of a material data breach involving 10,000 lost or stolen records in the next 24 months at 26 percent.

Given, these market findings and predictions, enterprises are definitely taking data security very seriously. So, opting for an Enterprise Mobility Solution has become quite a testing decision for big businesses and a mistake here could jeopardise the entire Enterprise Mobility Management (EMM) solution.

So, here’s a checklist of security features for a sturdy Mobile ERP Solution.

1) Device Security

Under this, enterprise apps can look at including some remote functionalities that enable locking or wiping the mobile device in case the device gets lost or stolen. Another possible feature is to incorporate corporate password policies and set up a mechanism to detect device misuse through fiddling with the device settings, meddling with peripherals, rooting of devices and other such suspicious activities.In addition to this, security device features like device lockdown and the blacklisting of of suspicious apps or apps from unknown sources can also enhance the protection of data from hackers.

2) Location Tracking

Although this might come across as a basic security aspect for an EMM, it is nevertheless an important one. Locating and tracking the device could minimize a lot of security issues.

3) Secure Remote Access

This is security aspect includes the setting up of a private, encrypted connection between mobile devices and corporate network. With this measure, information that gets transferred over the private and encrypted connection becomes difficult to decode by the hackers, whether information exchange is happening inside the office premises or a home network or even a public Wi-Fi hotspot.

4) Encryption

To dive deeper into encryption, it makes sense to have encryption as a part of an EMM. Here, the IT of the enterprise can have full control over the system and encryption process through a separate app-based workspace containing all the saved corporate data. With a secure workspace in place, whenever users switch to an app outside the workspace, the protected apps with crucial data get automatically locked. With a strong encryption backup, data will even remain safe in a device without password protection.

5) Data leakage protection

The DLP enables the prevention of deliberate or unintentional exchange of data from a mobile device. This means that DLP may provide access to authorized applications on a device when it comes to viewing a file but it won’t allow any untrusted application like a cloud based app to open or save the file (as they might have shared folders).

6) Secure Software Distribution

With this security measure, it is possible to securely push applications and software patches. It also has the ability to track the installed applications and successfully uninstall applications which violate the security mandates or tend to harm the system.

7) Advanced features & support in Platforms like Android, iOS, Windows

Some advanced EMM features like Android for Work offer great scope for enhancing data security. With the separation of business and personal data at the OS level, it’s possible to ensure high level encryption on Android smartphones and tablets.

How can we help?

Although the drive to ensure data security is always an ongoing process, the security aspects discussed here are a good starting point for ensuring a sound Enterprise Mobility Solution.

As a part of its mobility solutions, AppStudioz, offers several additional security features depending on the specific requirements of an enterprise and strives to provide a powerful EMM setup and environment. This empowers enterprises to run their business processes in a more automated manner which indirectly contributes in maximizing ROI through improvements in flexibility and productivity of the workforce.

In addition to that, AppStudioz has strong back-end integration skills that can facilitate a smooth process of integrating enterprise apps with existing MDM solutions like Airwatch and MAAS360, which are widely used by big enterprises today. Our expert team of engineers and developers have years of experience in developing apps with the incorporation of best development practices, which are in line with the OWASP guidelines. This helps in the elimination of critical issues like sensitive data exposure, security misconfiguration, broken authentication and session management, insecure direct object references, and a host of other issues.

The post Mobile ERP – Ensure Enterprise Mobility With Data Security appeared first on AppStudioz Blog.