Rob Smith is chief technology officer of Mobile Application Development Partners (M.A.D.) LLC and at MSS Managed Security Services GmbH. He has been working on mobile-device security for a long time and contributes a two-part essay with a review of the problem in this part and some practical advice in the second part. Everything that follows is his own work with minor edits.
* * *
A long time ago in an enterprise far, far away mobile devices were secure. Enterprises had limited mobile solutions; RIM BlackBerries and Palm Treos were your options. The BlackBerry, for example, thrived in the enterprise space because it was designed from the ground up to fill the needs of an enterprise. The phones provided a secure design, allowed administrators to control details about the device, and they were easy to manage. They were designed as a business device and therefore IT management learned to either accept or mitigate the risks by creating custom corporate policies to ensure compliance.
Enter Apple. Apple invested hundreds of millions of dollars in the design and user experience of the iPhone. Whereas the BlackBerry was focused on being a business device, the iPhone was designed to be cool, sexy, easy to use, and to provide the user with access to thousands of applications. Because these devices were designed primarily to appeal to the consumer, enterprise level security was not a primary focus. Suddenly, everyone wanted one. From the executive level down, demand in the corporate world to support them became unbearable until IT had no choice but to surrender and let a few of them run wild on their network. Exposure and risk were limited, as they were dealing with only a handful of devices – at first. That was until the second wave, when the devices could strike back.
Welcome to 2010 – never mind that, welcome to 2011 pretty soon. These may not be the Droids you are looking for, but they are the ones you have to live with. And now it is not just iPhones and Droids, but it is also iPads. On Apple’s most recent earnings call it was announced that two-thirds of all Fortune 100 companies are deploying or piloting the iPad. Odds are that if you don’t have an iPad already running rampant on your network, it soon will be. How does that custom policy document you created for BlackBerries apply to iPads?
In the second of these two installments, Rob Smith continues this discussion with some practical advice.
Smith is the CTO of Mobile Application Development (M.A.D.) Partners LLC in Atlanta, and has brought over two decades of technology design, support and management experience to the company. He currently oversees daily operations of product design and development and sets the strategic direction of the company’s technology and engineering endeavors.
