Nowadays you find Wi-Fi networks you can access easily everywhere… in coffee shops, restaurants and hotels, shopping malls, even out in the open street in major city centres.

This is great. It means that you can go online from your mobile phone, smartphone, tablet or laptop, indeed any portable device, in most places at any time at all.

The problem, as ever with the internet, is security.

What is Wi-Fi?

Wi-Fi (or WiFi) is a local area wireless technology that allows electronic devices to connect to each other. The term is not an abbreviation. It was invented as a play on the word Hi-Fi and is just a fancy name for a wireless local area network (WLAN).

Many devices, such as personal computers, video-game consoles, smartphones, digital cameras, tablets and digital audio players, can be connected using Wi-Fi. They link to a network (such as the internet) via a wireless network access point known as a hotspot.

Walls block the radio waves used by this technology. So indoors, the range is limited to about 20 meters (66 feet). Outdoors, however multiple overlapping access points enable many square kilometres to be covered by a single public Wi-Fi network.

Security problems with Wi-Fi

Wi-Fi can be less secure than wired connections. This is simply because an intruder does not need a physical connection.

Most of us are pretty good at protecting our PCs at home, using firewalls to prevent cyber-criminals from accessing our information and anti-virus software to reduce our chances of becoming infected with a computer virus or other malware.

The same threats are present when you access the internet using a public Wi-Fi network. The added problem is that you can never be sure whether a particular network or hotspot is secure.

Most public Wi-Fi networks do not use encryption, a form of security in which the information you send is encoded so it cannot be read by a third party.

In addition, you don’t even need a password to get connected to most public networks, which means that they are open to anyone in the area including you friendly local cyber-thief.

Logging into your bank account or other personal account over an unsecured network can be particularly dangerous as your log-in details could easily be read by a hacker, who will then be in a position to clean out your bank account or impersonate you using your personal details.

Protection on a public Wi-Fi network

As you can see, using public Wi-Fi networks can be quite risky. However, you can make yourself relatively secure if you follow these seven tips:

[1] Whatever device you use to access the internet, check that your anti-virus and anti-malware software is up to date and turned on.

[2] To make it more difficult for an attacker to gain access, make sure your firewall is turned on.

[3] Turn off sharing when you are on a public network. This will keep others from accessing your computer and files. You can turn it off in the Control Panel (Windows) or System preferences (Mac OS X).

[4] Avoid logging on to banking and shopping sites where, to do so, you have to enter personal and financial information. You should only do online banking or shopping over a trusted connection, such as a home network you know is protected.

[5] Go to sites with URLs that begin with “https” instead of “http”, as “https” sites use encryption to protect the information you send.

[6] Avoid automatically connecting to hotspots. Doing so will reduce your chances of being connected to a malicious hotspot set up to steal information. As before, you can do this from the Control Panel (Windows) or System preferences (Mac OS X).

[7] If you use public Wi-Fi a lot, a good idea would be to use a virtual private network (VPN). A VPN is like a private network which you can access from anywhere. However you need to subscribe to a VPN service for which there is a monthly fee. However a VPN is a smart choice for businesses, large and small.

Look around your organization for a few minutes, taking careful note of smartphones, tablets, and even smart watches in use. You probably see a lot more mobile devices in use today than you did a year or two ago. Now think ahead a few years, to 2019. According to a new report by MarketsandMarkets, you’ll be seeing a lot more of them. In fact, the report predicts that the enterprise mobility management (EMM) market will be worth $15,224.1 million by 2019.

With a compound annual growth rate of 36.9 percent from 2014 to 2019, the EMM market is expected to grow at an eye-popping rate — and for good reason (Source: Benzinga). As more workers rely on their own devices, their actions have the potential to strain networks and compromise security. At the same time, enterprise mobility brings a wealth of advantages. Striking the right balance is essential.

Why Manage Enterprise Mobility?

Smartphones, tablets, and wearable devices are here to stay, and employees are using them to connect to corporate networks. A recent study by BitDefender found that 60 percent of respondents had done so. Today’s mobile devices can virtually “do it all,” and your employees do not want to maintain and carry around two separate “do it all” devices. Even former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton resisted carrying around two Blackberry devices in favor of one for both official and personal use.

Because your employees will be accessing enterprise networks via personal devices, enterprise mobility must be managed. You’ll need to ensure that mobile workers have a secure means of accessing business applications and data regardless of device type. You’ll also need to offer effective mobile productivity and collaboration tools so that they do not feel the need to use external, and potentially less secure, applications.

Enterprise mobility also has its advantages. For example, service technicians can receive service and work order requests in real time while out in the field. They can also update their work orders immediately as well as order parts or schedule follow-up service. They can capture signatures or collect mobile payments. In short, you probably want mobile devices in many, if not all, of your employees’ hands.

In addition to managing mobility for security purposes, you’ll also want to manage it for performance. Mission critical applications such as sales force automation, business intelligence, and CRM need to perform regardless of where the end user happens to be. Meanwhile, many applications, especially videoconferencing and streaming applications, require extensive bandwidth. With multiple users using bandwidth-intensive applications on mobile and fixed devices, your enterprise network will begin to feel the strain.

Managing Enterprise Mobility Now

The EMM market is likely to be thriving in 2019, but what about now? According to MarketsandMarkets, the market was worth $3,169 million in 2014. EMM solutions such as Aryaka’s IP Application Delivery as a Service currently exist, providing optimized, enterprise-grade connectivity to remote and mobile users along with a superior means of accessing centralized enterprise resources (Source: Aryaka).

Look around your organization. Enterprise mobility is everywhere! How are you managing it?

Works Cited:

1. Benzinga, “Enterprise Mobility Management Market Worth $15,224.1 Million by 2019 – New Report by MarketsandMarkets,” – http://www.benzinga.com/pressreleases/15/04/p5413230/enterprise-mobility-management-market-worth-15-224-1-million-by-2019-ne

2. Aryaka, “Use Case: Mobile Acceleration,” – http://www.aryaka.com/use-cases/mobile-acceleration/

The internet has transformed the way people live. It has changed everything from the way we learn to the way we shop. We use the internet to carry out a number of activities ranging from reading news, playing games and interacting with friends and family, besides a number of other things. We think that we only receive information from the internet; however, this is far from the truth. In the process of browsing the internet, we actually send out a lot of information such as our identity and location. We generally aren’t as safe on the internet as we may think we are.

For instance, when shopping online, our name, address, and credit card information are transmitted over the internet to the vendor. With such private information being channeled through the internet, it is vital that certain measures be taken to ensure privacy and confidentiality of the data. Latest information technology news tells us that the number of cyber crimes is on the rise.

This is where encryption comes in. Simply put, encryption scrambles the data which is to be transmitted over the internet in a way that can only be decrypted by someone who has the encryption key.

The concept of encryption is based on cryptography, and it is of two types:

1. Public Key Encryption
2. Symmetric Key Encryption

Public Key Encryption

With this type of encryption, two different keys are used. There’s a public key and there’s a private key. For example, if a person wants to send encrypted data over the internet, the public key is used to encrypt the data; however, the data can only be encrypted by the recipient using their private key.

This method can be used to send secure emails and to digitally sign the documents. Secure Socket Layer (SSL) and its newer method, the Transport Layer Security (TLS), are examples of public key encryption systems.

Symmetric Key Encryption

In this method of encryption, both the sender and the receiver use the same encryption key. This simplifies the process and makes it faster. Nonetheless, the key and the data can be compromised while in transit over the internet. Data Encryption Standard (DES) was a type of symmetric key encryption that is replaced by a more modern Advanced Encryption Standard (AES).

Encryption of Data

The advantages of encryption aren’t just limited to the internet; you can encrypt your data on your computer, your USB storage devices, hard drives, mobile devices and numerous other data storage devices in order to prevent misuse of data if your devices are lost or stolen.

Importance of Encryption

As learnt from the latest information technology news, the number of cyber crimes is on the rise and this makes it necessary for computer users to keep their data safe from hackers. Large corporations and governments require high levels of encryption in order to protect their sensitive plans such as business secrets and confidential data. It also gives us peace of mind that our data is not getting into the wrong hands.