New report on the increasing risks of protecting corporate information
Monday, November 8th, 2010 John Gallagher, Sr. Public Relations Manager
An increasingly mobile workforce poses a threat to organizations’ information security programs, according to Ernst & Young’s Global Information Security Survey out last week.
This is something that iPass has been espousing for some time, as more and more company data sits outside of the firewall and in the cloud, it’s crucial that enterprises take action.
The report has a similar base of participants (1,000+) to the iPass Mobile Workforce Report, which will be out next week. 64 percent of respondents see data protection as one of the top IT risks.
“Organizations are operating in a world that requires borderless security. The trend toward anywhere, anytime access to information has significantly changed today’s business environment,” stated Bernie Wedge, Americas Information Technology Risk and Assurance practice leader at Ernst & Young. “Information access by employees using mobile devices…are considered outside traditional borders. Therefore, companies must think about security beyond their employees, data centers and firewalls.”
A lot of the study is based on perceptions among senior executives. Over 50 percent see personally liable devices as the main cause of data leakage. Interesting though that 53 percent see workforce mobility as a real challenge to delivering information security solutions – I suppose I’m surprised because iPass and its partners understand there are some great solutions out there currently.
Preventing people from using their smartphones for work is not a policy; it’s a hindrance to productivity. ABI Research has predicted that by 2015 more than 240 million business customers will be leveraging cloud computing services through mobile devices.
What is striking is that most respondents thought employee awareness of security as a challenge. Perhaps this is an opportunity for IT departments to step-up communication to its users on what can be done to keep an enterprise secure. There really needs to be an education and the more IT departments can communicate with its users the better placed enterprises will be when challenges arise.
Tags: Security
