Consumerisation Prompts Mobile Questions

Mobile computing is shaking up business – but smartphones and tablets are infiltrating organisations in a disorganised fashion, not under the control of the IT department.

Analyst IDC is predicting that 120 million more smartphones/tablets will ship than PCs this year, and the sector looks set to consolidate the remarkable growth of the last few years. Many of thses devices are sneaking into the office, adopted by tech savvy employees to run their personal life, then used to make their working lives easier. These devices are being integrated, with or without permission, into company networks.

Chaos theory

According to a white paper from Vodafone Global Enterprise, out yesterday, this “consumerisation” of business IT is beginning to raise questions concerning liability for security and costs.

Logically, it would be best for these solutions to be introduced on your own terms. Hundreds or thousands of employees using different devices and different apps, synching them with third-party cloud based services and potentially exposing sensitive enterprise data would be chaos.

But on the other had, giving employees the freedom to choose a device that suits their personality or preference, can empower them. And if the company is only liable for business usage, it can drastically reduce capital expenditure – ever popular in these squeezed times.

There is, however, a problem with that. Company data running through a personal device is still subject to compliance rules and regulations and, operating outside of the firewall, could be a breach risk.

Vodafone’s white paper says that consumerisation of mobile technology in the work place has already happened – whether CIOs know it or not.

If this is true to the extent claimed then the enterprise must ensure that it is able to assert effective control over how the devices access, store and use company data. The fastest way to the front page these days is to lose, or have stolen, private or confidential customer data.

Speaking at the white paper launch Nicholas McQuire, research director for EMEA Enterprise Mobility and M2M at researchers IDC, said that new gadgets boost morale and issuing them represents an opportunity to improve security.

“This is actually in some respects an effective carrot for employees to pay a little bit more attention to information security and policy,” he said.