Interview with Luke Knowles of Wandera

Who are Wandera and what do they do?

Wandera is a leading mobile security company, providing multi-level protection for users, endpoints, and corporate applications. Security teams worldwide rely on Wandera to eliminate threats, control unwanted access, prevent data loss and enhance user privacy. The company pioneered the application of data science to tackle the complex challenges of mobile security with MI:RIAM, the industry’s most effective threat intelligence. Recognized by analysts and trusted by thousands of enterprise customers, Wandera was founded in 2012 and is headquartered in San Francisco and London.

What do Wandera see as some of the key challenges facing senior IT executives?

Mobility into the enterprise has exploded, what started as a consumer technology quickly spread into businesses allowing employees to work in a more agile & flexible way. Operational demand for an infrastructure that enabled mobility grew quickly, but left IT scrambling to keep up. The nature of mobile devices presents a number of security challenges that aren’t necessarily covered in the traditional security stack.

As yet, companies have not invested in mobile security solutions in the same way they have in their traditional infrastructure. Many companies have started by using mobile device management (MDM) solutions which allow for fast deployment of business apps, the ability to block unwanted apps and also wipe devices remotely if there is a security risk detected – more aimed at management and configuration rather than protection. But with the growing prevalence of BYOD ownership models, employees aren’t necessarily comfortable having corporate technology installed on personal devices possibly monitoring traffic.

While MDM’s may be the first step in managing mobile devices, without a Mobile Threat Defense (MTD) solution in place it is impossible to tell if a mobile is infected with malware, if someone has clicked on a phishing link if an app is leaking data, and the list continues.

Attackers are wise to the fact that corporate mobile devices are often the weak link in a company’s infrastructure, and exploit this weakness through targeted campaigns. Phishing is the number one threat to mobile, backed by research from Google, Black Hat and US Homeland Security, and last year research showed that 76% of businesses suffered a phishing attack. Furthermore, users are 3x more likely to click on a phishing link on a mobile device than on desktop.

The proliferation of mobile malware is also a top security concern for enterprises across the globe. Research from Wandera showed 13% of all organisations experienced a malware incident on a mobile device in 2018.

With data breaches hitting the news daily, companies can’t be too careful when it comes to security. Mobile security needs to be given the same resource and investment as all other parts of a businesses IT infrastructure. With the corporate perimeter becoming porous, companies need to adopt a more risk averse stance when it comes to security and protect at both on the endpoint and at the network level.

How can Wandera help secure mobile devices?

Wandera has a mobile-first approach to security. It integrates into your EMM/UEM solution allowing you to make the most of your existing investment. Based on a zero trust model, the integration allows for continuous conditional access. By communicating device-based risk status (based on multiple outside-in and inside-out threats), Wandera enables organizations to control access to corporate data and applications based on the threat status of the device.

The Wandera app not only provides effective endpoint security, protecting against threats on the device such as malicious or risky apps and detecting man-in-the- middle attacks. Our Secure Access Layer employs network-level protection to proactively stop threats from reaching the device, blocking phishing, malware and cryptojacking, and initiating a secure tunnel when under attack.

Whatever your device strategy – BYOD, COPE, COBO – our solution is built with privacy at the forefront, with no private data decryption or monitoring of personal data on the device: such as text messaging, emails, or photos. Wandera is designed to safeguard your employees with encryption so actual data is not visible whether at rest or in motion, while ensuring they don’t fall prey to phishing theft of their own personal credentials.

The admin portal gives admins access to see what security issues are lurking within their fleet. There are a number of dashboards which give insights into what apps are leaking data, if anyone is clicking on phishing links, and any malware installed on devices. As well as this you can see who is operating outdated OS’s and if anyone has jailbroken their device. From here, admins can set policies in place to monitor devices and only flag up the issues they want to see. They can also block access to sites just as adult, gambling and extreme, which are areas of the internet well known for their higher risk.

Wandera are well known in this space and the only vendor who secures mobile devices end to end. Wandera were recognised in Gartner’s 2018 Market Guide for Mobile Threat Defense as well as identified as a leader in IDC’s MarketScape for Mobile Threat Management.

What are the key messages that attendees will take away from Wandera’s roundtable discussion?

Join Wandera’s Asia Pacific mobility leader Luke Knowles for a roundtable discussion to learn more about how you can protect against the rapidly changing mobile threat landscape. You’ll hear real life examples of how other business have been infiltrated and what steps have been put in place to mitigate future risk, and importantly what technologies are most relevant in helping CIO/CISO’s protect against mobile threats.

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