HID Global has revealed that security and compliance are a major concern for CIOs and IT departments across the Middle East, as a result of the increased usage of mobile devices by employees.
A survey conducted by HID Global across the Middle East region found that 97% of the respondents said that the widespread use of mobile devices by employees, has significantly increased their organisations risk profile for security breaches, data loss and/or compliance issues.
Respondents to the survey included CIOs, CTOs, IT department heads and decision makers from the banking and finance sector, healthcare, oil & gas, and the government sectors. The survey revealed that all of the respondents’ organisations extensively used multiple mobile devices such as notebooks, tablets, and smartphones.
However, the most significant cause for concern for 83% of the respondents in terms of security and compliance challenges was found to be malware on an employee’s device. 95 percent of the respondents said their organisation had not suffered any security breaches in the past 12 months.
“The findings indicate that CIOs and IT departments are clearly concerned about the risks and challenges associated with increased use of mobile devices by employees,” said Andrew Lintell, Director of Sales, Identity Assurance, EMEA with HID Global. “However, it is encouraging to see that security and compliance is high on the agenda for organisations, even though they have not experienced any breaches in recent times.”
While organisations acknowledge that cloud-based storage services are widely used among employees, 34% said that they strongly discouraged or prohibited users from using these services to access company data or services. The findings further revealed that 42% of respondents provided unofficial advice and support when problems related to cloud-based services occurred, while only 4% believe the use of personal devices to access cloud-based applications and/or cloud services to be of concern. Additional survey findings include:
- Lost or stolen devices were a concern for 8% of the respondents, and the lack of enterprise best practices for using mobile devices was a concern for 5% of the respondents.
- When asked about two-factor authentication 86% highlighted that this type of authentication has already been deployed and was a company-wide requirement to secure mobile devices,
- Three percent said that multi-factor authentication was used only for certain applications or at certain levels of employee access.
- At the same time, 10% of the respondents said they were uncertain if two-factor authentication solutions are being used by their organisation.
