What does the Sidekick backup failure mean for enterprise mobility?

Companies have a lot to lose

By John Cox on Mon, 10/12/09 - 2:31pm.

T-Mobile's Sidekick users, consumers and business folks, are frothing at the mouth over the apparent permanent loss of contacts, calendaring, phone numbers, photos and other data from their mobile device.

That's because all that data was synchronized and stored, but apparently not in fact securely backed up, on servers overseen by Sidekick creator Danger, now a Microsoft subsidiary. That architecture was part of Danger's innovation, an early "cloud-based" data service for mobile users. A server failure (so far no other details have been released) may have wiped out much if not all of the stored data.

The blogosphere is already debating the implications of the outage for everything from the survival of the Sidekick itself, to T-Mobile's undoubted court appearances once the class action suits get filed, to Microsofts culpability for this spectacular IT failure, to the Future of Cloud Computing. We've got a brief history of some of the cloud outages, which are getting more attention.

But closer to home, it ought to have a more urgent implication: how is your company protecting the data on the mobile devices used by employees, from the CEO downards? And how good is that protection? Part of the anguish for T-Mobile users is that data on the device is minimized in favor of the presumably more reliable online service. But storing all the data on the device isn't a better "solution" just a different problem, as lost, stolen or broken smartphones attest.

Platform players like Microsoft and RIM can offer an array of tools for some of this, but I'm pretty sure that data protection is like data or network security: it's a multi-level problem that calls for an array of decisions, actions, and monitoring.

What steps has your company taken in this area? What else needs to be done?