Are You Prepared for the Flood of Gifted Mobile Devices?
Paul Henry - January 7th, 2013
It’s the Nightmare Before After Christmas
Christmas 2012 may have been a geek’s dream but it will likely become the CIO’s nightmare.
As reported by The Daily Mail, Christmas shoppers snapped up one tablet computer EVERY SECOND and retailers report sales up 1,000% over 2011. Tablets were one of the hottest Christmas gifts of 2012 so now that the holiday is over and everyone is back to the grind, you can bet many of your users will be bringing their new mobile device to the enterprise. In fact, 75% anticipate mobile device usage in the workplace to increase this year, according to the 2013 State of the Endpoint Report just published by the Ponemon Institute (commissioned by Lumension). 80% believe tablets, laptops and smartphones pose a significant security risk in the enterprise yet sadly, the report also told us only 52% have a strategy in place to secure them.
The good news? BYOD can boost productivity and process innovation. It also empowers employees and increases employee engagement. It is no wonder that a recent Forbes article noted that tablet adoption over the next 5 years within the enterprise is expected to grow to over 96 million tablets – that’s about 48% compounded annual growth per year.
The bad news? Security risks brought by employee-owned BYOD are real and cannot be ignored. I think many IT departments get hung up on where to begin.
Developing a comprehensive BYOD policy is the first step in managing employee owned devices and fortunately, there is no need to start from scratch anymore. A quick search at www.Whitehouse.gov will find a great U.S. government toolkit for BYOD that includes valuable example policies. Mapping regulatory considerations to address controls within the enterprise is important so don’t do what many organizations do and wrongly leave it out entirely.
Additional BYOD trends and practical steps on how to improve your security posture in light of the risk brought on by your many mobile devices will be discussed in the 2013 Data Protection Maturity Report presented on January 22. I hope you will join me.
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Over 48% of IT Directors say that mobile devices represent the greatest network security threat.
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