Today’s college and university students are mobile and technology-savvy. They arrive on campus with an array of mobile devices including tablets, smart phones, gaming devices and laptops. They roam wirelessly – downloading music, chatting, texting, and sharing videos. They are untethered from wires… and often from concerns about mobile device management and security.
Information security takes on new dimensions in a mobile context. The protection of sensitive data, IT systems, and user privacy requires different strategies. Given the limited control colleges and universities have over the mobile devices and apps on campus, what mobile device management solutions can educational institutions find to address issues of mobile security?
Faced with a dynamic and varied mobile landscape on college campuses, IT professionals are tasked with the need to keep data secure, support costs down, and educator and administrator productivity up. Mobile device management point solutions lack the comprehensive view that security demands. Sensitive student, medical, and financial information can be stored on these mobile devices, and educational institutions are at risk of costly data security breaches.
So how do IT administrators secure, control, and manage mobile devices? Administrators looking to implement a strategy on their own campuses should focus on these three mobile device management and security steps:
- Safeguard the network – This includes security of transmission, a secure on-campus network, or VPN off campus. IT can configure and secure on and off campus networks through certificates, which automate the login process and make it secure.
- Safeguard information and documents – All sensitive data on the device need to be encrypted. Put in place a policy that, if the encryption is turned off, you can pull data off the device.
- Safeguard the applications – For schools writing campus-oriented apps, make sure the app manages data securely and that you can delete the app, if necessary. If the iPad or device is university-owned, you need to blacklist/protect against any “rogue apps.”
Mobile device management solutions at colleges and universities should enable granular configuration of all mobile resources and empower IT staff to manage the health and security of both traditional and mobile endpoints from a single pane of glass.
The Kaseya IT Systems Management integrated framework extends management to mobile devices via the Kaseya Mobile Device Management (KMDM) solution. As students and educators continue to access school data and applications on their mobile devices, educational organizations can use Kaseya Mobile Device Management to implement business continuity, accessibility and security policies on those devices.
