Industry View

Five Trends Driving the Need for Better Mobile Security

Mformation Chief Marketing Officer Matt Bancroft outlines five mobile security trends keeping CSOs up at night

By Matt Bancroft

Network providers have made their pricing models more attractive to enterprises as well. Rather than per-minute, per-transaction or per-byte pricing, which is difficult to budget for and therefore very unattractive to enterprises, data services are being offered in attractive pricing bundles, including "all-you-can-eat" packages.

With this sort of power in such a small and portable package, many executives and managers are finding their mobile handset to be as irreplaceable as any PC or laptop. Unlike PCs and laptops, however, mobile devices carry an equally significant amount of information in a much smaller and more portable package that is incredibly easy to misplace, lose or steal, significantly increasing the risk to the enterprise.

Trend 2: A move toward more powerful, IP-based network infrastructures is leading to increased use of data-heavy mobile services, which need more sophisticated management. Wide-area networks are continually being enhanced to deliver the bandwidth necessary to support new data-heavy mobile services and applications. These enhanced networks offer improved breadth of coverage and reliability - key objectives for most mobile operators. UMTS (Universal Mobile Telecommunications System) in GSM-based networks, and EV-DO (Evolution-Data Optimized) in CDMA-based networks, both represent significant improvements in these areas.

4G networks such as WiMAX (Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access) are now being rolled out, enabling ever more sophisticated, data-heavy mobile services and applications. 3G LTE (Long Term Evolution) and other all-IP variants are shortly to follow.

More than a decade of R&D has gone into securing PCs and laptops connected to the Internet and corporate intranets. These technologies are now commonplace in enterprise networks. The same level of attention needs to be paid to these highly portable wireless devices if they are to succeed in the enterprise. However, simply porting PC-style security and management systems to the wireless arena ignores the very small form factor, extreme portability and vastly different usability expectations that are unique to mobile devices and wireless connections. IT organizations are finding that they need to find a middle ground, leveraging some of the R&D done in the PC/laptop arena while keeping the unique needs and the requirements of the mobile device in mind to ensure the mobile experience is not negatively affected in any way.

Trend 3: Increased numbers of corporate users of mobile devices accessing company applications and data at all levels of the enterprise are creating a huge headache for IT departments. Not only are more company executives than ever before beginning to depend on their smart mobile devices, but also staff at all levels are increasingly "going mobile." Smartphone use is rapidly driving down into the ranks of middle management and staff workers. Sixty-seven percent of CIOs responding to the Coleman Parkes survey reported that the proportion of non-managerial staff with access to advanced corporate mobile devices will increase, with fully one third of them indicating that the proportion would increase significantly. And in many cases, when the enterprise doesn't supply mobile devices to employees, they are simply using their personal mobile devices to transact company business and run company applications, with or without the knowledge of the IT organization.

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