ANTenna Blog -- Security

Can a single unsecured smartphone compromise your business's security? Looks that way -- and that should make you look hard at who's got phones in your company, and how they're using them.

Here we go again. As we've pointed out often, the explosion of powerful, capable consumer communication/IT devices holds a lot of risk for your company.

A long Informationweek look at the business dangers of rogue smartphones tells you why.

A rogue device is, in this context, one that an employee -- or, for that matter employer -- buys personally and then uses for business purposes.

In the case of smartphones, as the article points out, the devices' convenience, power and declining price makes them all but irresistible to road warriors, would-be road warriors and, increasingly, nearly everybody else.

And as employees lean more heavily on such devices, the devices become more and more filled with company data, company information, even company access codes.

All of which goes with the employee -- until the employee forgets the phone, loses the phone or has the phone stolen.

Or, assuming the person's at least cautious about keeping the phone physically close, holding it tightly when he or she uses it to pump company info through an unsecured public access point.

Time to put into place strict and inflexible security procedures and policies regarding employee use of personal mobile (and other) devices for company business.

Past time, really, and not getting any safer to wait, as Eric Zeman's article points out, with plenty of detail on just how to go about securing rogue devices.

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