UC
The recent California Supreme Court ruling permitting police to search cellphones without requiring a warrant should give pause to all enterprises. While it’s likely that this ruling will face a higher court challenge, as of now California police have a legal right to search not just phone records, but all application and data that resides on the phone–including corporate-owned data. Still unclear is whether or not those arrested are required to turn over passwords or expose data protected via biometric or token-based security.
This ruling is likely to spur demand for services and mobility device management (MDM) products that enable remote wiping of personal or company provided phones. We’re seeing a tremendous amount of interest in MDMs from our clients, primarily as a way of easily supporting a wide variety of devices across Android, iOS, BlackBerry and Windows platforms, and to enable company control over employee-owned devices when permitting those devices to access business applications.
IT managers should develop proactive plans for mobile device management to enable rapid destruction of data in the event devices are lost or stolen, or employees are arrested. The first call may not be to a lawyer, but to the IT help desk.
