e-Lessons Learned

Increasingly, our society devotes a lot of time and energy to the use of smartphones. Whether it is a BlackBerry or an iPhone, it is the craze, and many now feel that they need to access their emails from the palm of their hands. And the corporate world is no different. Executives spend as much time focusing on the best ways to read emails, send and receive instant messages, and access the Web as the rest of us.

However, executives (and the corporations they work for) who use company intranets, also need to worry about the possibility of unintentional data distribution — meaning they should concern themselves with the fact that confidential information may be disseminated unintentionally or unexpectedly to the public. For example, if an employee-owned smartphone was reported lost or stolen, what would a company do to make any relevant data on the device unreadable? Maintaining mobile communication security is an important issue that companies need to address, now.

In his article, John Sawyer recommends that the key to solving the problem of mobile communication security is to provide “support” for such devices. Why does that mean? Whenever a company releases a new device, or software, it is bound to encounter inquiries from employees if some malfunction occurs. Typically, IT receives the calls for any technical issue and works to fix the problems.  Sometimes outside service providers supply this support. Sawyer suggests that corporations handle the support in-house because it is simply too difficult to try and manage a wealth of devices from different service providers and have them fit under a single security system. Providing employees with a uniform service will help ease a company’s problems. Still, it is important to note that there are some options for managing multiple outside service providers, including Zenprise and BoxTone.

Other security suggestions include having employees use a single computing platform or encrypt company-issued devices. This will help when creating policies specifically for the correct use of these smartphones.

Article posted on January 24, 2010 at 4:13 PM |              More... 
Tagged as: Computer Forensics Protocols, Privacy.
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