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Security and BYOD: Security Concerns Increase as BYOD Trend Grows
Increasingly companies are allowing their employees to use their own devices to access corporate data.
Amy Cheah, market analyst for Infrastructure at IDC, said that “Widely publicized and high-profile BYOD case studies are further adding to the peer pressure. One in every two organizations are intending to deploy official BYOD policies, be it pilots, or partial- to organizational-wide rollouts, in the next 18 months.”
Fiaaz Walji, Canadian country manager for Websense, said that “Mobility has exploded When you look at the average worker they now carry a smartphone, a tablet and a laptop computer. Given this flood of mobile devices in the workplace, we find the IT guys have no choice but to allow employees to connect to the (corporate) network. It increases productivity because workers are always connected, but it also increases the risk.”
Stephen Midgley, vice-president, global marketing for Absolute Software, said that “What is really driving it is the rapid growth of Apple in the enterprise. It is driving BYOD. With the iPad 3 coming out and shipping now, you’ll see even more of that.”
Results from Forrester Research reported in the Wall Street Journal show that company executives are spending on average $3000 of their own money for devices that they use for business, and even non-executives spend on average $1200. The hope is that the devices will give them an edge in the workplace and pay for themselves with salary and bonus increases.
Larry Ponemon, chairman and founder of the Ponemon Institute, said that “we surveyed hundreds of IT security professionals, and mobile devices were overwhelmingly important to business objectives. However, mobile devices put organizations at risk—risks that they do not have the necessary security controls and enforceable policies to address. It’s also clear that employees are deliberately disabling security controls, which is a serious concern.”
A Ponemon/Websense survey of companies in Canada found that 63 percent of breaches occurred as a result of mobile devices. There is a trend of an increasing number of breaches occurring as the number of mobile devices accessing corporate data increases.
A study by Mobilisafe examined breaches that occurred as a result of employee personal devices accessing the corporate data infrastructure. That study found that:
- 71% of devices in the study had severe flaws and vulnerabilities in the operating systems of the accessing mobile device
- High severity mobile device vulnerabilities are appearing four times faster than were reported in 2011
- 38 different OS versions sudied contained high severity vulnerabilities
