by Administrator
12. January 2010 19:36
Everyday more and more people are using mobile devices to store and transport important documents and files from location to location.
But it's not just private workers and consumers who are turning to mobile devices. Government agencies and companies are also beginning to turn to mobile devices in a bid to increase productivity between workers. Industry analyst firm IDC have estimated that there will be 1 billion mobile workers by 2011. This means there will be at least 1 billion portable devices.
But what happens when these devices get lost or stolen?
You might have the "it'll never happen to me" attitude but you might want to think twice when you see the statistics. The Ponemon Institute recently conducted a survey of 900 US companies. The results were shocking and rather worrying.
- 43% had lost a device that contained personal information
- 32% didn't report the loss in a timely fashion
- 33% had lost USB drives, 31% had lost CD's/DVD's, 21% had lost Blackberrys or iphones, while 5% had lost laptop
Losing company data is a big deal and can turn into a legal issue. In October 2009 a laptop was stolen from Halifax Health which contained the data of 10,000 patients. Halifax Health then had to notify all the patients and advise them to sign up to credit monitoring services.
McAfee has estimated that loss of intellectual property through lost mobile devices costs companies £1 trillion a year.
So how do you make mobile devices secure?
Private citizens who have their mobile device stolen will just face the expense of replacing it and the hassle of replacing and backing up the data. But for many companies, a new law now means that they have to inform every person whose details have been leaked. This costs both time and money.
The best way of securing your mobile device is to use encryption. Encryption technology scrambles the information on your device so that, should your device be stolen, only the person who knows the password will be able to open the device and unscramble the files.
Despite encryption technology being widely available, only 38% of companies encrypt data on mobile devices.
This is surprising when encryption comes as standard on many mobile devices and is easy to use: Apple Mac OSX has FileVault while Windows 7 has BitLocker. It's also available on many smartphones.
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