In today’s digital world, safeguarding an organization’s assets, resources, and sensitive data from unauthorized access, theft, or corruption is the biggest challenge for enterprises. The robust security policies and stringent controls assist organizations to protect their assets from internal and external cyberattacks.

With the introduction of remote working and BYOD, a plethora of mobile devices are now connected to the corporate network, thereby increasing attack vectors and threat agents. To protect organizations from these ever-increasing cyber threats, an efficient Mobile Device Management (MDM) solution with a kiosk feature plays a vital role as it secures an enterprise from accessing malicious websites and apps by enforcing policies and monitoring devices.

The kiosk feature in MDM software locks down a device to a single or set of approved applications/weblinks while blocking all other features of a device. The MDM solution offering a kiosk feature protects organizations in the following ways.

Secures Sensitive Data

The kiosk mode in Mobile Device Management software protects the sensitive data of a corporate. By restricting access to only approved and necessary apps, an organization can reduce the risk of data exfiltration either intentional or unintentional.  

For instance, a bank may deploy kiosk mode to restrict access to their online banking module rather than providing access to the entire system. In this way, the user can only access information for which he is authorized.

Prevent Unauthorized Access

Another useful feature provided by kiosk mode is to control unauthorized access. This feature is quite useful in the public kiosk where multiple users have to access this device. In an MDM solution, an admin can create different groups depending on the level of information employees require to perform job responsibilities.

Based on this, necessary apps along with required permissions and features can be enabled with the help of kiosk mode and assigned to users so that their activities can be controlled and managed. In this way, a user not authorized for particular data or resources cannot access it by any means. To increase security, access control mechanisms can be employed in order to control access to sensitive data along with kiosk mode.

Mitigate Cyber Attacks

The kiosk mode plays a very important role in mitigating cyber-attacks by controlling the attack surface. By enabling kiosk mode, a user can access a limited number of applications or webpages rather than the whole device or numerous websites/databases present all over the network.

This automatically limits the attack vector as the user does not have the authority to visit multiple resources that protect the device from its vulnerabilities. In most cases, malicious codes and payloads are embedded in the web pages so when users access those sites that code automatically executes and compromises device security.

With the help of kiosk mode, a user can access only approved websites that are safe and aligned with the organization’s policies and procedures. Likewise, kiosk mode assists companies to use approved apps only with appropriate permissions and features. All these factors eventually reduce the attack surface and help enterprises mitigate novel cyberattacks.

Improved Monitoring and Control

For monitoring and control, kiosk mode can be used to limit access of users to some necessary apps and features that eventually reduce the activities of employees. Consequently, IT admins can easily observe the activities of users and can detect suspicious actions in a timely manner. To enhance security, IT admins can configure kiosk mode in a way that in case of inactivity, the user can be automatically logged out after a certain time interval.

Reduced Maintenance and Support

Since kiosk mode locks down a device to certain apps therefore its maintenance is easy. It reduces the threat landscape of an organization so the risk of intentional or unintentional breaches is minimum which lessens the need for extensive repair or downtime. This eventually minimizes the workload of the technical support IT team.

Cybersecurity has always been a big concern for many companies, but MDM solutions have made it a lot easier and smarter to deal with it. Use kiosk mode to get ahead of your competitors and provide your business the best security tool.