It seems that CEOs are perfectly justified in their paranoia about staff passing on vital information to the competition.
It seems that CEOs are perfectly justified in their paranoia about staff passing on vital information to the competition.
A survey conducted this year by research agency the Ponemon Institute found that 59 per cent of employees who left their jobs last year admitted to stealing confidential company information, while 24 per cent continued to have access to their employer’s computer network following their departure.
Creating a failsafe system is trickier when smartphones are added to the mix. The new iPhone 3GS can store up to 32 gigabytes of data, enough for millions of pages of documents (or over 20 full-length movies). This can bring a whole new meaning to the phrase “flexible working”.
It’s possible to seal USB sockets shut, disable Bluetooth connections and restrict the installation of mobile sync software like iTunes. But that’s at the expense of the productivity gains such technologies offer.
Safety first
The rather clunky-sounding “end point protection” software attempts to guard against security breaches.
DeviceLock, for example, can be used to control the use of peripheral devices by putting in restrictions such as allowing employees to sync only information from their calendar to an iPhone, rather than whole files. Despite the relative ease of prevention, DeviceLock has found that 40 per cent of businesses knowingly allow staff to download company data onto removable devices such as USB drives without any security provision.
Controlling that, says Alexei Lesnykh, business development director at DeviceLock, makes good sense: ‘If the mobile device is lost or stolen, there is the potential for a data leak. In any corporate environment it’s obvious that your employees will bring in personal mobile devices and use them to sync data.’
The hard part is working out how far your security measures should go. Lesnykh continues, ‘Smartphones are considered very useful in a business environment. Oracle has chosen the iPhone for its mobile CRM development, and an increasing number of business applications are migrating to mobile development platforms.
‘The solution is not to prevent iTunes or block syncs, but to control them.’
