Proliferation of mobile devices boosts selection of security events

Almost three-quarters of companies believe that the proliferation of mobile devices has contributed to a rise within the collection of security events of their organisation long ago two years.

According to a survey of 100 UK IT professionals by Check Point, 74 per cent believe that the selection of mobile devices has increased security events, while 66 per cent said the collection of mobile devices utilized in their organisation had greater than doubled during the past two years.

A loss of security awareness among employees was cited because the biggest risk to mobile data, followed by mobile web browsing (61 per cent), insecure WiFi connectivity (59 per cent), lost or stolen devices (58 per cent) and malicious mobile application downloads (57 per cent). 

Juliette Sultan, head of world marketing at Check Point, said: “The consumerisation of it's far a few of the top concerns for CIOs this coming year and we would have liked to evaluate from IT administrators the present security challenges they face in terms of mobile computing.

“The explosion of mobile devices connecting to the company network often creates greater opportunities for data loss and increased security management complexity. We anticipate this trend will continue to rise in 2012, encouraging enterprises to enforce the fitting remote access policies to minimise the frequency, risk and fees linked to securing the mobile enterprise.”

The survey also found that non-public devices often store and access a number of sensitive information, including email (79 per cent), customer data (47 per cent) and login credentials (38 per cent) for internal databases or business applications.

Andy Jacques, EMEA general manager at Good Technology, told SC Magazine this week that the difficulty of mobile-related data risks would come to the fore this year.

He said: “If you lose a laptop or suffer a cloud security breach, then it belongs to the corporate. Here is about bringing on your own phone with little or no due diligence and support, and applications connecting that the IT team do not know anything about.

“If there's a breach then you definately can say that you simply applied best practice or prepared for the scenario, but when this can be a breach and the CISO says that they didn't know anything about it, that's when it's a problem.”