7 Tips To Secure Your Enterprise Mobile Apps

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October 27, 2021 Business

An enterprise application is any program that improves certain aspects of an enterprise. For example, it can help with the company’s communication and automate repetitive tasks. Either way, these apps should expand the company’s endeavor but that’s not always the case.

If you’ve been keeping up with the news, you’ve probably heard of the ongoing issue concerning cyber threats. It involves malicious individuals and hackers who exploit or steal information from organizations for profits. They do this by infiltrating systems via entry points and through enterprise mobile apps.

To prevent these individuals from potentially invading your system and costing you thousands of dollars in the process, you must secure your enterprise mobile apps. This article discusses seven tips to help you secure your enterprise mobile apps.

1. Follow The National Standards

If you delve deeper into your country’s law, you’ll find that there are several acts that state the standards an organization must follow when providing services or goods.

For example, in the health industry, there’s the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). It’s a federal law that requires entities to secure patient data. Also, it covers several topics to help practitioners understand how to protect patient data. If you want to know more about this particular standard, you can check hipaa consulting services.

Similarly, if you’re a developer and you plan on creating a mobile app, you have to follow numerous standards to ensure the security of your users’ data. Examples include:

Common Vulnerability Scoring Systems (CVSS)
Common Weakness Enumeration (CWE)
Internet of Secure Things Alliance (ioXt)
OWASP Top Mobile Threats

Following these standards would allow you to cover your base and ensure the minimum security standards.

2. Enforce ‘Strong Password’ Rules And Policies

If your enterprise mobile app is like the majority, it probably requires your employees to enter their username and password to log in. This is the first line of defense against hackers.

However, remember that hackers can easily brute force their way into your application by guessing your employees’ passwords. Therefore, to prevent that from happening, you must enforce password rules. For example, you may require your employees to do the following:

Include numbers and letters,
Add some special characters,
Combine lowercase and uppercase letters, and
Use at least 10 characters.

With these rules, hackers might have a harder time guessing your employees’ passwords, thus could ensure a better way of securing your enterprise mobile app. But of course, it doesn’t end there.

3. Implement Multi-Factor Authentication For Logins

Apart from requiring a stronger password, you may also implement Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) for login prompts. Multi-factor authentication refers to the practice of requiring more than one way for your employees to access the mobile app.

For example, instead of just asking for the password, you may require them to provide a combination of other factors. These additional authentication factors include One-Time Password (OTP), Personal Identification Number (PIN), and validation links sent to your mobile number or email address. Biometric information from fingerprint, face, and voice recognition tools could also be used to verify access to these apps.

Like the previous tip, this strategy would make it harder for hackers to get into the enterprise mobile app, further enhancing the application’s security.

4. Prepare Against Device Theft

Whether you like it or not, losing a device or getting it stolen is a widespread occurrence in many places. If this happens to one of your employees, it could be a severe issue.

Thus, another person will have access to the device and the mobile app. Naturally, you don’t want that to happen, but the best you can do is to prepare against device theft. For starters, you could install a feature in the app allowing you to control other devices remotely from your main computer.

That way, if an employee ever loses their device, you can ask them to either log off or completely wipe the data in the phone. Either way, it’ll prevent the worst-case scenario from happening.

5. Discourage Employees From Jailbreaking Or Rooting

Jailbreaking and rooting have recently become a trend due to the supposed benefits they can bring to mobile users. Unfortunately, these two acts can compromise the security of the device.

In other words, jailbroken or rooted phones are more susceptible to be compromised than those that aren’t. Thus, this could become a liability to your enterprise mobile app’s security. With that said, you should discourage your employees from doing either of these on their devices.

6. Restrict Access To Sensitive Information

Even after spending time and effort educating your employees, you may still find a few individuals here and there who aren’t following the policies you’ve set.

If that’s the case, you might as well minimize the damage by restricting access to sensitive information. Rather than giving your employees access to all the company’s confidential information, you should provide minimal vital data relevant to their job. Simply put, you must restrict access to those who may not need certain information.

7. Encrypt The Application Source Code

When hackers get their hands on your enterprise mobile app, the first thing they’ll do is decipher the source code. After doing so, they could create a believable imitation of the app.

They will then share that app with the public and add some malware or virus. By doing so, they’re ruining your reputation through potential data leaks from acquiring data in the falsified app.

That’s precisely why you must encrypt the application’s source code before releasing the enterprise mobile app among your employees or the public. That way, hackers will have a hard time cracking the code. But since the hackers are most likely going to use their latest technology, you should also use the latest encryption methods, such as:

Triple Data Encryption Algorithm (TDEA)
Advanced Encryption Standard (AES)
Rivest, Shamir, and Adleman (RSA) security
International Data Encryption Algorithm (IDEA)

Conclusion

If you thought conceptualizing and developing the enterprise mobile app was difficult, then you’ll probably struggle with securing the app as well. Not only do you need to encrypt the app, but you must also manage your employees. This is so they don’t fall victim to hackers and leak sensitive data about the app. With these tips, securing your app should be a lot easier than before.