Mobile workforce poses increasing security threat

Thursday, September 23rd, 2010 Karen Ambrose Hickey, Editor

No, our headline does not imply your mobile workforce is going rogue and is about to attack HQ. I’m referring to a report out this week from Symantec, which highlights the importance of implementing acceptable usage policies and pre-connection procedures to protect a company’s assets.

“In general, more policy blocks overall are triggered by workers when they are out of the office, indicating rather intuitively that users are more compliant with usage policies when in the office,” said Paul Wood, MessageLabs Intelligence Senior Analyst. “More than one-third of workers that are both remote and desk-based trigger a greater number of policy blocks when they are out of the office perhaps taking the opportunity to visit a greater variety of websites than they would when at their desks.”

When you consider that research firm IDC puts the mobile workforce at one billion strong by the end of 2010, security becomes an even more pressing enterprise concern. As Sean Ryan, IDC research analyst said earlier this year: “Vast opportunities exist for bringing a variety of mobile technologies to the world’s workforce…Underserved mobile workers across all regions stand to benefit from the reach and flexibility offered by mobile solutions…the potential market for mobility solutions is enormous.”

As connectivity and security go hand-in-hand, the more secure your connection, the better it is for IT managers and HR managers to overcome the risks associated with both mobile and desk-based workers triggering a potentially damaging incident. Just look at the news this week about the Twitter security flaw. Arming a mobile workforce with the appropriate compliance and security policies and pre-connect procedures on their mobile devices enables enterprises to make their organizations more secure without having to try and develop written policies that fall on deaf ears.

Tags: Mobile Control, Security