Archive for the ‘Best Practices’ Category
Thursday, February 2nd, 2012
John Gallagher, Sr. Public Relations Manager
Several years ago, a colleague of mine had her smartphone stolen out of her room in Las Vegas. It didn’t stay in Vegas, in fact it was recovered by hotel security three days later – a hotel maid was dealing in stolen phones. But by that time she had already contacted IT, and a replacement smartphone was on its way.
Ah the days of corporate provisioned smartphones.
In the era of “Bring Your Own Device,” it is hard to know what to do when your personally-owned smartphone is lost or stolen. And this happens more than you may think, in fact in the Q4 iPass Mobile Workforce Report we found that 16 percent of mobile employees have had a smartphone lost or stolen.
So what do you do? To answer that question I sat down with our resident security guru Chris Witeck.
If it is a personally owned device he recommends that you contact your carrier right away, and if it has any business data on it (including email) then call your IT help desk as well. Your IT help desk may be able to remote wipe your phone, or disable your Microsoft Exchange account so that thieves won’t be able to break in. And if you recover your smartphone later hidden between the seats of your car, your wiped data can be easily recovered.
Time is of the essence though. Chris told me that many criminals will take the battery out to prevent remote wipe, and use a room without mobile access to break into the phone. When you consider all of the valuable information that you may store on your smartphone, like credit card information and passwords – it is important to act fast.
However, the first time we think about our smartphone security shouldn’t be after an incident. Chris recommends that you be prepared.
For IT:
- Enforce a strong password policy, and make sure your employees can’t leave their smartphones unlocked.
- Consider two-factor authentication, something the user knows combined with something the user has like a USB token or a smartcard.
- Ensure corporate data is encrypted.
- Enable device wipe capabilities whether it is a company-provisioned device or a personally-owned device.
For the user:
- Password protect your device, and make sure that it locks after five to 10 minutes.
- Password protect your password note page. With so much data and access in the cloud, I know I have more passwords than I can remember. Chris told me that many people use their notes program on their smartphone to store passwords. If you are going to do this, you should password protect the note. Simple enough.
- Invest in a “find a device” tool like the find my iPhone tool part of iCloud, or third party tools such as Whereismycellphone, BlueRetriever, Lookout or iTag. That way you can determine if your device was stolen, or just lost.
- Respond quickly when your device goes missing.
Lost Or Stolen Smartphone? What Do You Do? >>
Wednesday, November 2nd, 2011
Karen Ambrose Hickey, Editor
There’s some “over-sharing” going on.
In Stop Sharing Your Files When You Travel, David Strom explains that you are “literally sharing your computer’s data files across the hotel (and some airports too)…
The problem is that many hotels and other public spaces use a flat network for their Wifi (or even wired) service, so that once you connect up to it, you are on the same network as everyone else. In some places, there are dozens of computers visible that have sharing turned on.”
His tip: when you get ready to leave for your next trip, take the two minutes and turn off your file sharing before you leave your office or home.
As a precaution for our users (and any business traveler), you should implement client side configurations and security software to protect yourself against cases where this is wide open.
Be safe out there!
Stop sharing while traveling >>
Monday, July 25th, 2011
Chris Witeck, Director Product Marketing
I just had a chance to come back from a great visit to the UK, talking with some of our European customers as well as talking to some of the European press and analysts.
This visit allowed me to ask some questions and get some insight on the impact of data roaming in Europe- especially in light of the EU legislation in this area, and also to get some real world examples of how organizations are working with personal smartphones and tablets being brought into the organizations.
The hot topic with the press and analysts (other than Rupert Murdoch) is the EU legislation regarding roaming tariffs/controls. What would the impact be for European companies when it comes to roaming costs? I think most are taking a wait and see approach, but the early consensus was that this won’t do much to impact roaming bill shock in the short term as the caps will phase in over a number of years.
One concern raised several times is that carriers won’t just let this revenue go away, and may make up for any losses by pushing up roaming rates for EU travelers to leave the EU, or for non-EU travelers coming in to the EU. In short, still potential for complexity and bill shock – although it may make things simpler for inter-European travel. Still a strong need for good user notifications and good controls for data roaming (both domestic and roaming), which is something that iPass is really investing in.
We talked to a couple of large pan-European customers, and both were fully embracing employees selecting their own smartphone or tablet. However, they are offering to fund the mobility costs on the personal device when it is used for business purposes.
The bring-your-own-device trend is definitely a global phenomenon, but I’ve seen many organizations offer different approaches when it comes to who pays for the data access on those devices, varying from the employee pays for everything, to the employee is compensated partially, to the employer pays for access.
Our view (and our Mobile Workforce Report backs this up) is that the more the user has to pay for access, the less likely they will use the device for work-related purposes. It was good to talk to these customers and hear their approach- they will fund data access for personal devices, but at the same time they expect that employees make sensible choices with that access (meaning avoid data roaming when possible, when using a paid access point, limit personal usage- save the personal usage for when the company is not paying for access).
This is another area that iPass is investing in; providing smartphone and tablet users with usage information that will help them make informed decisions on when to use Wi-Fi vs. mobile broadband, and which applications are consuming the most data.
What devices were our European customers seeing?
When it comes to IT-managed devices, still no change there – Windows is the dominant platform (but with a wider acceptance of Mac for certain job functions). With personal smartphones and tablets, I expected to hear that iOS (iPhones, iPads) was what everyone was choosing.
Yes, iOS is popular, but I was equally surprised to hear that many of the devices being selected by employees were Android devices. You may argue that is not surprising given the Android sales numbers, but often times in the Enterprise we don’t hear that much about Android, so from that perspective, it was interesting to hear.
The other platform that was mentioned many times by both customers and the press/analysts was Windows Phone 7, with the expectation that when Nokia rolls out their first Windows Phone that there will be immediate adoption across Europe.
Are you seeing the same thing if you are in a European country?
Mobile workforce and roaming costs in Europe >>
Thursday, July 14th, 2011
Karen Ambrose Hickey, Editor
What are the new technical and commercial models for extending cellular services through Wi-Fi?
Join Dean Bubley, Founder, Disruptive Analysis and author of Disruptive Wireless blog for a free webinar on July 28th, 1:00 pm ET.
Turning Wi-Fi into a Viable Extension of Your Mobile Broadband Offering
Dean, joined by iPass’ Marcio Avilez, Vice President of Network Services, to discuss the transition from a mobile voice to a mobile data business model, causing service providers to explore options and best practices to complement their cellular infrastructure with Wi-Fi. However, perfecting both network interoperability and user experience remains a challenge.
There has been discussion on the viability of this model and how service providers can incorporate Wi-Fi easily and gently. roaming business travelers need access to email and other cloud services without exorbitant costs. How can you take advantage of this use case and make it work?
Register today. If you can’t attend, you should still register to get access to the recording. This will give you new insights into the new iPass OMX service.
And, unlike many things in life, this webinar is free.
Webinar: Making Wi-Fi part of Mobile Broadband Strategy (iPass OMX) >>
Tuesday, July 5th, 2011
Chris Witeck, Director Product Marketing
We have talked a bit on the iPass blog regarding advancements we have made on the different client platforms out there, whether it is discussing our new Open Mobile for iOS client, the new look and feel of our Open Mobile for Macintosh client, or the granular policy controls we’ve enhanced recently for our Open Mobile for Windows client.
Today I’d like to draw attention to some of the great enhancements we’ve rolled into the Open Mobile Portal.
We don’t talk about the Portal that often, and we should talk about it more! The Portal has a tendency to just keep rolling out great releases a couple times per quarter that often get caught up with the different Open Mobile client releases. Behind every great ‘Control’ type feature in the Open Mobile client is the ability to configure it in the Portal.
Lost in all of this is the fact that the Open Mobile Portal is evolving into a great reporting tool for gaining insight into how mobility is being used across all mobile employees. Many people still think of iPass as helping users to connect to an iPass network, but did you know that in the Open Mobile Portal that we can show all of your Mobile Broadband data usage for those employees you have given a Mobile Broadband data card?
We recently enhanced our Mobile Broadband data usage report to differentiate between roaming and non-roaming users and to easily switch between a graphical view and a per user listing of Mobile Broadband data users.
You can see who are your heaviest users — those bumping up against usage limits as well as incurring heavy roaming fees — along with seeing those who are not using the cards you give out, so you can consider reassigning those cards to someone else. Historically, the Open Mobile Portal reports focused on the number of connections people make by type of connection, but another recent enhancements allows you to look at usage in megabytes, not just for Mobile Broadband as discussed above but for Wi-Fi, Ethernet and even dial users. You can then see who your heaviest users are in terms of usage across all access types.
As more of your organizations traffic moves outside of the corporate network- remote users accessing cloud applications is a perfect example, it is important to maintain visibility on who is making those connections, on what type of device they are connecting and the type of connections they are making. This is important for tracking productivity and costs of your increasingly mobile set of employees.
The nice thing is that the Open Mobile Portal is evolving along with your organization, providing the exact information you need to keep tabs on mobility across your organization. With the Open Mobile Portal rolling out releases several times per quarter, there is a lot more on the horizon that I can’t wait to talk about.
Are there other features that you want more details on? Leave me a comment, or Tweet back to iPass (@ipass).
Open Mobile Portal Reporting Enhancements >>
