Every business understands that the workforce is constantly changing, and they will be left behind if they don’t change with it.

By the year 2020, around 46% of the workforce will be made up of millennials. By that time, it is estimated that around 72% of the workforce will be mobile employees. Even now, around 60% of employees do work away from the office sometimes.

A Growing Mobile Workplace

Millennials are the first generation that has grown up with digital devices in front of their face always. As they begin to move into the workforce, they bring with them their firm expectations that they can work how, where, and when they want on whatever device they prefer.

In the past, mobility solutions have faced resistance from businesses, mostly because they don’t want to put their data at risk by allowing it to leave the office. This position is going out of style, though. The mobility of business is almost inevitable, so teams for security and risk management must be ready to make mobile deployments secure.

Mobile Threats Faced by Businesses

Criminals are still learning how to best take advantage of mobile devices. Right now, security programs on mobile devices are extremely low, especially in comparison to desktop and laptop computers. Even now, most IT managers do not fully know the extent of the mobile workplace environment. Most employees have several applications on their mobile devices. Though an individual’s device may not have many apps itself, when you multiply it by the number of employees in the business, it quickly adds up.

The prolific use of mobile apps creates a major vulnerability for the business. Many malicious apps show up in legitimate app stores, while others show up in third-party stores where the user wanders in to look for a free version of a paid app. Perhaps the employees’ children use their devices to download games off a third-party app store and, inadvertently, the infection gets into the enterprise.

Organizations have long had to deal with the headaches of phishing and ransomware, but these threats are now moving into the mobile space. Ransomware on a mobile device is typically less of a threat than if there were on a PC, though, because the individual device would be locked up rather than an entire system.

Regardless, the threats on mobile devices will continue to grow exponentially. Knowing that the use of mobile devices in a work environment is continuing to grow as well, it is wise for every business to invest time and money in securing data from mobile threats. The millennial workforce is counting on it.