* Networking officials have to be increasingly cognizant of the inherent vulnerabilities of mobility
Enterprises are increasingly mobilizing their workforces, but at the risk of opening themselves up to more hacker attacks, loss of sensitive data and less management control.
Networking officials attending last week’s Globalcomm 2006 conference in Chicago said they are equipping more of their company’s employees with wireless devices in order to get them closer to customers and increase productivity. But at the same time, these officials say they have to be increasingly cognizant of the inherent vulnerabilities of mobility.
“You can connect more, but guess what? More direct attacks,” asks Andy Farkas, assistant vice president of emerging technologies at Capmark Financial Group, Horsham, Penn., the largest servicer of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae mortgages. “More malware, more software patching (which) costs more money. So the more we give our employees to connect, the more vulnerabilities we’re going to have to face.”
Capmark employees use a mix of BlackBerry, Palm, Audiovox and Imate handheld devices to enter and retrieve loan information to and from back office systems in Horsham through a Web-based portal written in Microsoft’s .Net language. Disparate devices potentially make for a disjointed security strategy.
Capmark has to balance that concern with the possibility of losing business.
“It makes our life harder for deploying it but it makes (workers’) life easier,” Farkas says. “We don’t want to make it so Draconian that we know it’s secure but it makes it less easier to connect. One size does not fit all.
“For the amount of devices we have, it only takes one deal to save or to bring up new business” to equal out, he says.
Mobility has increased the number of malicious attacks on Capmark’s network, Farkas says, which has forced Capmark to take the initiative in its attack awareness.
“The number of attacks are up but the damage is not because we are more proactive,” Farkas says.
