Security Measures in an Enterprise Mobile Application

Mobile applications have become an essential part of our daily lives. People use them for entertainment, productivity, news and business related purposes. The information that these applications are subjected to, makes their security a great concern. This article discusses the measures that should be taken to stay safe

Security is the key parameter of concern while deploying a mobile application for business purposes. Some of the widely emphasized features of an enterprise mobile application are discussed in this post.

Mobile technology is improving day by day and so is its area of application. Gone are the days when businesses relied on desktop applications for their computing requirements. With dynamic market conditions, it became a necessity to include mobile devices in business operations due to the ease of handling and on-the-spot data processing features a mobile device provides. It gave rise to the concept of developing mobile applications oriented specifically for enterprises and businesses called Enterprise Mobile Application.

Enterprise Mobile Applications are mobile apps which provide the capability of processing confidential data from a mobile device. An enterprise mobile app further connects to the company server using internet as the medium to connect and fetch data. The main difference between the enterprise level desktop application and mobile app is that desktop apps works within the campus and firewall of an enterprise network in a secured manner whereas mobile apps operate outside the boundaries using internet, which make them more vulnerable to security threats.

To strengthen the security of a mobile application to make it suitable for handling and processing company’s data, different security consideration should be made for proper utilization of mobile technology. To implement mobile application security, following considerations can be made:

  • Password Storage: Authentication is an obvious feature which is included in an enterprise-level application. To ensure the safety in mobile app, coding should not be done to store the authentication fields i.e. username and password in the cache of the app. Each time the user should provide these parameters to validate their identity to safeguard the corporation’s data.
  • In-transit data encryption: Mobile apps connect to a company’s server over the internet, which exposes the data exchange between the device and server. In order to secure the data efficiently, encryption of data transmitted over internet should be done. This protects the data from any kind of data theft or loss and also, minimizes the probability of misuse of data even if it is intercepted.
  • Remote Wipe features: This feature initializes the deletion of all the data on a lost or stolen device. An authorized device to access the VPN of a company’s server, if lost, could potentially be dangerous to a company owning the data on device. With remote wipe, all the company related data can be removed from the device remotely so as to restrict any kind of misuse of the device.
  • Data Segmentation: Various IT policies for partitioning the personal and enterprise data and applications should be implemented. It has become more crucial with the introduction of concepts like BYOD and BYOA in business operations. This allows the IT department of a company to maintain and manage the security in mobile apps and data in a more efficient manner.

Managing security in enterprise level mobile apps is a crucial component of mobile device management and enterprise mobility management strategy of an organization.

Mobility has become an integral part in the functioning of organization’s processes and this makes mobile app security a key area of concern.

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