Interviews

Wearables in the workplace

by Mark Rowe

It’s important for organisations to embrace wearable technology, such as smart watches, whilst balancing the security risks, writes Mike Raggo, pictured, Director of Security Research at MobileIron.

The launch of the Apple Watch in early 2015 was greeted with a noisy media clamour. A little over six months later, Apple declared that seven million units had shipped, and it would have been higher if it weren’t for supply problems.
But Apple isn’t the only player in the game; Samsung, Motorola (set to become Moto soon), and Chinese manufacturer Shenzhen, are just some of the manufacturers developing smart watches. Then there’s Fitbit, the first wearable tech company to go public, which displayed its new offering, the Blaze, at CES 2016. Shipment and sales figures will dip and rise just like in any market but the inescapable truth is that wearable technology is not only here to stay, it’s going to become increasingly commonplace at home and in the workplace. Much of this is driven by the Internet of Things (IoT), with the ubiquity of the Internet harnessed to the power of immediate remote communications.

Vested interests

We’re already seeing this from medical devices to cars and household devices, all hooked up to the internet and accessible from mobile devices. For enterprise organisations, this has profound implications. We can’t just dismiss wearable technology as a passing fad, it isn’t. It’s a new technology wave just like mobile phones were years ago, and look how far that technology has come.

Research already reveals an emerging demographic drawn to wearables and unsurprisingly it’s the young and clued up, professionals with children under 18, and men between aged 18-34. And it’s not just a new gadget thing; there is practicality, such as reading emails, viewing documents and receiving reminders about meetings and calls. Developers and the app industry have driven the smartphone revolution as much as the hardware manufacturers, and it’s interesting to note that common business tools, such as Salesforce, have developed apps for smart watches. Truck manufacturing giant Scania is urging drivers to adopt smart watches; Fujitsu has developed wrist-based devices for field workers, and Disney has ploughed about $1 billion into wearables to improve customer service. The point is that the revolution has already arrived. In fact, analyst company Forrester discovered that 68 percent of global companies it surveyed chalked up wearables as a ‘priority’ for their business.

Shortcomings, vulnerabilities

Some organisations may be tempted to impose bans on smartwatches in the workplace because of the risks they potentially pose, such as difficulties in imposing remote policies, remote configuration and centralised management tools. And then of course, many do not include encryption, so users remotely accessing business data via a smart watch is understandably a risk. However, this lack of ‘management functionality’ often comes down to the architecture of the device. One manufacturer’s smart watch may have encryption as a central feature while another’s doesn’t. For instance, Apple Watch 2, slated for release in September 2016, is rumoured to have more functionality when separated from an iPhone because of a new wireless chipset. This means that third-party apps may be able to send and receive data independent of a phone.

Answers

From an enterprise perspective, it’s going to be a question of, watch and learn. Organisations need to develop a wearable strategy by keeping an eye on such things as device popularity and functionality. For instance, a Samsung smart watch can operate independently of a phone. In short, as smart watches and wearables gain ground in the corporate sphere, organisations will need to bring together their own application development teams, contractors, and system integrators to ensure they can develop core security features to wearable applications. To some extent, this is already happening, with some independent software vendors starting to add important features such as encryption to wearable apps.

For the most security conscious organisations, separating and isolating corporate data from personal on a mobile device with the use of containers, can be a key mitigating factor to accessing email, documents, and sensitive corporate data from a smart watch. This will apply limits to its use in the enterprise, yet balance that by allowing users to use smart watches for personal use. Of course there is an alternative – banning wearables in the workplace, but then we all know the story of King Canute trying to halt the incoming tide, don’t we?

For more information

Download a whitepaper here: https://www.mobileiron.com/en/whitepaper/smartwatches-wearables-and-mobile-enterprise-security.

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