Are you smart with your phone?

Many organisations now allow employees to use the smartphone of their choice for work related activities. This is based on the evidence that it increases employee satisfaction and productivity. However, the organisations don’t fully comprehend the extent of the security challenges this creates.

Most also think that allowing employees to use the smartphones of their choice either has no impact on or only somewhat decreases the overall security of their company’s networks and information. This is an indication that organisations might not be educating employees on the potential security risks these devices create and how to best keep them and the data on and accessible through them protected.

Given that completely unmanaged personal use of a work-related smartphone could potentially open security holes in an organisations network, there needs to be an urgent review of security.

The need to password protect mobile devices is well communicated, but guidelines around the downloading of apps for smartphones is less so. Given the fact that the majority of malicious malware for smartphones involves legitimate apps that have been Trojanized and re-published on third-party app hosting sites, organisations need to do better at communicating policies and/or best practices related to downloading apps.

Personally identifiable information and competitive or proprietary data are the most common forms of data that need to be protected.

As well as company information ask yourself the following question. If you lost any of the following items which one would give you greatest emotional distress - laptop, smartphone, wallet/purse or car keys. At the moment it’s probably the wallet/purse.

As smartphones become more sophisticated, and end users are using them for an ever increasing list of daily activities, this will change. As end users store more of their digital lives on mobile devices, the need to properly secure and manage them will only increase.