Protect privacy and provide secure mobile access to corporate data

In this Help Net Security podcast, Mike Campin, VP of Engineering at Wandera, talks about how their solution solves a problem that every business is facing today, which is how to fully embrace the mobile and cloud revolution, whilst ensuring that their sensitive corporate data remains safe.

Here’s a transcript of the podcast for your convenience.

Hello. I’m Mike Campin. I’m VP Engineering at Wandera, and on this Help Net Security podcast I’m going to be telling you about our new Secure Access Layer.

What is the Secure Access Layer? It’s an extension of our award-winning mobile threat defense platform. It extends our up-based MTD capabilities into the network to provide comprehensive prevention of content and network threats.

It solves a problem that every business is facing today, which is how to fully embrace the mobile and cloud revolution, whilst ensuring that their sensitive corporate data remains safe. But what really differentiates the Secure Access Layer, and this is what makes it special, this is what we’re really proud about, is that by putting the end user front and center throughout the design and build process, we’ve created a security product which is a win for both the enterprise and also for the end user. The Secure Access Layer is a security solution which actually enhances end user privacy and delivers a great user experience at the same time.

Enterprise mobility trends

Before we dive into more detail about what the Secure Access Layer can do, I’m going to describe some of the trends that we’re seeing at the moment in both enterprise mobility, and also the latest on the mobile threat landscape. Together, these show why the Secure Access Layer meets such an important and pressing need.

It’s going to surprise no one to hear that mobile has overtaken desktop as the preferred medium for access to corporate data and apps. Over half of access now, we think is about 60 percent, is via mobile, and this figure continues to grow. As companies look to enable productivity, BYOD has become mainstream. There has never been a greater need for a mobile security and risk management solution that works seamlessly across the mobile landscape, regardless of whether the device is managed or unmanaged, owned by the company or owned by the user.

Mobile threat landscape

Let’s talk a little bit about the threat landscape on mobile. Here at Wandera we look at this as app threats, device threats, network threats and content threats. Like the recent WhatsApp exploit, is a great high-profile example of how, despite the best efforts of Apple and Google, because these ecosystems are so complex, there will always be vulnerabilities, and these are always going to be exploited.

But it’s not just about the app and device threats, network and content threats also pose a significant risk to the safety of corporate data. A great example there is the increased number of phishing attacks we’ve been monitoring through our platform. We see a new phishing site registered every 20 seconds. These phishing sites employ a wide variety of techniques, such as punycode and long domains, many of which specifically target the mobile form factor. Protection against content and network threats is a key strength of the Secure Access Layer, and it’s why endpoint protection alone on mobile is insufficient.

What end users expect

The last key driver I’m going to highlight today is the rise and importance of the end user. Today end users expect products and services which put them in control, which respect their privacy and of course which they really enjoy using too.

If you tried to deploy a product or service which doesn’t achieve these goals, it’s very likely that the deployment simply isn’t going to work. It’s going to be wasted investment on the part of the company.

In the case of a security solution, if the deployment doesn’t work it means that the protection that you’re paying for just simply isn’t going to be there. The Secure Access Layer employs a user centric design and addresses these points and more.

Wandera Secure Access Layer

The Secure Access Layer is a suite of technologies which extends our MTD app and allows a number of security challenges to be addressed at the network layer. It employs privacy preserving network-based policy to prevent content and network attacks. This is fully integrated into our unified policy engine and this I find really exciting because, by unified policy engine it means one policy that works for both mobile and also traditional endpoints. Out of the box, the Secure Access Layer supports iOS and all flavors of Android, but we have support for Exten, which is our laptop client, coming soon.

Our groundbreaking mobile security AI called MI:RIAM, works across both the endpoint and the network to provide true zero-day defense, including malware and phishing protection.

A key part of the Secure Access Layer is our new privacy enhanced browsing technology, which is part of the overall Wandera privacy framework. This enhances end user privacy by encrypting DNS lookups, which means, for instance, a service provider can’t build a profile of that user’s browsing habits.

A key part of the secure access layer is our new privacy enhanced browsing technology which is part of the Wandera privacy framework. This enhances end user privacy by encrypting DNS lookups. Now this means for instance that a service provider can’t build a profile of that user’s browsing habits. Also incorporated into the Secure Access Layer is our failsafe VPN technology. This automatically encrypts all traffic, and so all sensitive data whenever a user is using a risky Wi-Fi hotspot or a compromised Network Access Point.

And whilst we’re on the subject of risk, the Wandera Mobile Risk Graph performs continuous device, user and network risk assessments. This holistic understanding of risk can not only be used to support internal compliance processes, it can also be bubbled up via API to third party conditional access services, and so used to determine whether a user should be granted access to cloud services or not, in real time.

Finally, the basis of all of this is our app, which makes deployments easy, and puts the user firmly in control. That’s the Secure Access Layer. It delivers mobile security in perfect balance with privacy and UX.

If you want to learn more about the Secure Access Layer, or anything else we do, please come and speak to us at Wandera.com. Thank you.