COMMENTARY: How Endpoint And Mobile Device Management Can Help Crack Down on Risk 

Financial firms live and die by their reputation. While we know that, with credit unions, insurance companies, and holding companies, the result of a cyberattack could mean funding challenges, reputational damage, and even insolvency, what many don’t know is that, today, around 70% of business risks enter through an endpoint (i.e., laptops, tablets, mobile devices, etc.). That means that, as businesses and financial institutions continue to digitally transform—supporting a work-from-anywhere workforce and customer base with increasingly complex and interconnected technologies—a widening endpoint estate  can easily introduce new business risks.

As leaders from the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago wrote several years back, “The portability of endpoint devices, coupled with the surge of remote work, increases a bank’s risk exposure to cyber breaches due to potential susceptibility to theft or misplacement…Unclear staff guidance and understanding can further exacerbate this weakness by fostering uncertainty, thereby leading to cybersecurity mistakes.”

While mobile phones and a variety of other devices are increasingly being used to conduct business, the threat endpoint devices pose to banks and financial-service firms is immense, and the fallout can be unpredictable, even catastrophic. As more employees continue to work from anywhere on more remote devices, protecting endpoints with modern, easy-to-use tools is essential for business continuity and resilience.

Here’s what else financial-service firms should be thinking about as they look to better protect themselves against widening endpoint risks while maintaining compliance, ensuring positive employee experiences, and bolstering customer satisfaction. 

We’ll start with how larger technology stacks contribute to heightened risk. It’s not rocket science, but more devices equal more risks, and banks are up against a particularly ruthless breed of bad actors. According to the IMF, nearly one-fifth of reported cyber incidents in the past 20 years have affected the financial sector, causing $12 billion in direct losses to financial firms. And as endpoint estates widen—through trends and growth like remote work, mergers and acquisitions, and employee expansion—the security risks only increase.

As FSIs and banks strive to maintain compliance and secure customer assets and sensitive information while ensuring the business runs smoothly, the ability to manage a variety of endpoints—mobile devices, tablets, computers, servers, you name it—in a single place is critical for long-term resilience. And yes, it is possible!

Additionally, as more organizations expand their IT portfolios, adding even more applications and productivity tools to their IT stack, there’s a lot of room for bad actors to take advantage of unidentified gaps. By focusing on consolidation and visibility, modern endpoint management can help financial-service firms get ahead of the risks from remote workers, a growing business, and tightening regulation, while contributing to an even better employee experience in the process.

Don’t forget to account for mobile. New trends like the rising reliance on mobile devices for business purposes add to a list of growing security concerns in financial services. Today, 84% of organizations allow or require employees to use personal cell phones for work purposes, and 48% of employees spend at least an hour a day on their cell phones for work.  

Banks and other financial-services firms need endpoint management solutions that account for trends like the rising use of mobile devices. And with modern approaches to mobile-device management, IT teams can more conveniently and efficiently manage risks across all endpoints before they can impact the business, while curbing unnecessary cost and complexity fueled by IT-tool sprawl.

IT teams are often understaffed and overworked across the board, and with varying levels of experience mixed with accelerating mobile growth, there’s a particularly glaring gap in device-management expertise. Bad actors are quick to take advantage.

Consider where a consolidated endpoint-management strategy can help, particularly one that accounts for the growing reliance (and vulnerability) of emerging endpoints like mobile devices. Employees and customers can continue to bank better, and more securely, from anywhere, even as the organization and its infrastructure grow.

—Josh Schofield is director of product management at NinjaOne LLC.