Imagine a day without your phone. Just the idea of not having it with you just a few hours probably creates anxiety-induced panic. We rely so much on our mobile devices, and for most of us, they rarely leave our hands or our pockets or our side. As soon as our phones became “connected,” we used them to Google quick answers, find directions to our destinations, pay for our purchases, even make phone calls! In a relatively short span of time, the way we use our phones has drastically evolved. And so have our expectations for how we should be able to use them. We are just as attached (if not more so) to our phones in our professional lives as we are in our personal lives.

But the more we can do from our phone, the more vulnerable to risk we become.

One trend we are seeing in organizations is the use of mobile phones as a means of access. And it’s not just us observing this trend. By 2022, Gartner predicts that 70% of organizations using biometric authentication for workforce access will implement it via smartphone apps, regardless of the endpoint device being used. In 2018, this figure was fewer than 5%.

That’s a massive spike over four short years. Whether augmenting a smart card or replacing it altogether, organizations today are enabling mobile devices to support a wide range of use cases, including workstation login, single sign-on (SSO), virtual private networks (VPNs), web access encryption and digital signatures. Ideally, each of these applications involves high assurance security — securing the communications to authenticate users and validating devices with digital certificates issued by a PKI. It only makes sense for organizations to further leverage that investment.

Our customers securely push those digital certificates out to mobile devices using our Derived Credential solution. This solution integrates with leading MDM/EMM platforms to enable digital identity and device management. Just like that, organizations can deploy and leverage strong identities for mobile devices and reduce risk with this enhanced level of protection and policy control.

So, let’s go back to the beginning… knowing it’s hard for most of us to imagine a day without our mobile devices by our side, it only makes sense to leverage that device to secure and empower users with anywhere-anytime access.

 

Follow the links for more information on Entrust Datacard’s Derived Credential or MDM Integrations.