September 29, 2015 By Kevin Olivieri 3 min read

Crack open your favorite beverage, break out the finest chips, get a comfy spot on the couch and make sure your mobile device is fully charged: It’s football time, and the magical marriage of fantasy football and mobile devices has changed how we interact with the sport.

Fantasy Football Brings Fans Closer to the Action

Gone are the days of the simple spectator. That’s been replaced by the participator/spectator hybrid fans who actively create teams of individual players in the NFL, maniacally cheering for their success and hanging on for each throw, run, field goal and even punt for nearly every game, hoping desperately for their players to put up some points.

The second- (or even third- and fourth-) screen experience that is commonplace in modern television has been taken to new heights when it comes to football Sundays thanks to the popularity of fantasy football. Users spread their attention among what games are being aired while also obsessively checking their myriad fantasy football apps, websites and social chatter to see how their teams and individual players are performing.

Thanks to an industry boom, there’s a lot on the line these days with fantasy football. It’s now a massive industry: 75 million users strong, a market worth $70 billion and $14 billion in lost productivity for employers. New leagues and sites keep popping up with ways to offer users whatever contests they might be interested in. Want bragging rights over your friends? You can simply set up a league for that. Interested in competing against strangers to test your mettle? There are apps and sites for that, too. Don’t want to commit to a full season? DraftKings and FanDuel are there for you to play in one-week leagues with cash prizes on the line.

Mobile Devices Mean No Breaks in the Game

It’s a new world we’re living in with sports thanks to mobile devices. But as users spend hours searching for sleepers, tinkering with optimal lineups and trash-talking their friends, they’re doing so on the same devices that they’re using to create, edit and share corporate documents. The same devices they are using to fire off angry or playful missives at their fellow leaguemates, they’re also using to communicate with clients and fellow employees.

In their quest for the upper hand against their opponents, users are spending an average of nine hours a week playing fantasy sports, diligently scouring the Web to find key information that’ll help them construct the best team possible. It’s a search for insider tips, but it’s a search that might take them right into the hands of malicious outsiders, preying on unsuspecting users with malware-ridden apps and sites. For every Matthew Berry or Jamey Eisenberg dispensing valuable information, there’s a cybercriminal ready and waiting to infect a device. Without the right solution in place, corporate data is as vulnerable as a Pop Warner football team going up against the Super Bowl champs.

We may not realize it, but we’re navigating through a minefield of potential risks — but that doesn’t have to be the case.

Organizations Look to Prevent Data Fumbles

Organizations can avoid catastrophic risks to their corporate data through a separation of the personal side of the device from the corporate, which hosts sensitive data, docs and apps, with an enterprise mobility management (EMM) solution — ideally one with a secure productivity suite. This dual-persona approach creates a safe, secure and containerized environment that will house the corporate data within the end user’s mobile device. That way you won’t need to worry about having your corporate documents shared to outsiders or inappropriate emails sent to clients when they’re meant for a league commissioner.

Even with iOS 9’s added security of the six-digit passcode, organizations can take extra assurance over the security of bring-your-own-device (BYOD) in the mobile environment since top-of-the-line solutions offer support for the latest iterations of these operating systems.

Try out a free 30-day trial of MaaS360 today and get your mobility initiatives game ready.

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