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

This proliferation of devices that can access company applications and data is creating a huge headache for IT departments. Not only do they need to minimize the risk associated with the possible loss, theft or misuse of a growing population of devices, but they also need to find ways to manage and secure everything from company-issued mobile devices to a host of different personal and partly personal mobile devices.

Trend 4: More advanced and data-heavy mobile applications and services on employees' mobile devices require more sophisticated monitoring and management.

Over the past several years many industries have come to rely upon mobile enterprise applications. BlackBerry devices, for example, have become de rigueur among investment bankers and lawyers who need always-on access to e-mail, calendar and market information. Government organizations are using mobile devices to capture information from remote government employees for a wide range of tasks, including Emergency Medical Services (EMS), traffic management and even animal control and tracking. In the health-care industry, physicians and case workers can now capture and access health information at point of care using their mobile devices. Popular mobile enterprise applications used across all industries include sales-force automation, field-force automation, fleet management, inventory management, mobile tech and wireless CRM.

Employee mobile devices often contain a wide range of applications and data files, both company-issued and personal. However, according to the Coleman Parkes survey, 63 percent of CIOs interviewed do not actively monitor the types of data that employees are storing on their devices. Nothing prevents employees from installing data and applications onto their devices that could cause problems for the company - from unknowingly circulating viruses to not playing well with corporate systems or not adhering to corporate security policies.

Trend 5: More and more sophisticated security threats are appearing as new devices provide richer targets.

Although, so far, infestation of wireless handsets by Internet-based security threats has been relatively low, new threats to mobile devices, including malicious programs (viruses, worms and Trojan horses) continue to appear. In just the last few months, two new Trojan horse viruses, one targeting Symbian SMS messages and another targeting specific Windows Mobile programs; two new worms, one targeting particular Symbian phones and one targeting multimedia cards; and a new spy-ware application have shown up in the market. Thankfully, none of these malicious bits of code have caused widespread damage. However, despite the fact that the current threat is not particularly high, most industry experts are saying that the iPhone, Android, and mobile devices with WiFi and other broadband capabilities will undoubtedly be rich targets for malware and viruses in the coming years.

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