Corporate mobile devices wide open to security breaches

Stuart Corner
Wednesday, 05 April 2006 15:36

Business IT - Technology

A worldwide survey of executives in major corporates has found few organisations taking effective steps to secure mobile devices, leaving their networks open to attack.
Security concerns are the biggest obstacle to the widespread adoption of wireless and remote computing in businesses according to the global survey by the Economist Intelligence Unit and sponsored by Symantec Corp.

More than 60 percent of companies surveyed are holding back on deployment, citing security concerns. Close to 47 percent of respondents cite cost and complexity as a major obstacle to deployment, and almost one in five businesses had already experienced financial loss due to attacks via mobile data platforms.

According to Symantec, the Economist Intelligence Unit's research highlights serious weaknesses in firms' present security arrangements for mobile devices.

"While 82 percent of businesses worldwide indicate that they see the damage from virus attacks as the same or greater on a mobile network than on a fixed network, only 26 percent have actually assessed security risks of smart phones, compared with 81 percent of enterprises conducting security assessments for laptops," Symantec said.

"Despite the proliferation of mobile device use in the enterprise, only 9 percent of companies have incorporated a comprehensive security architecture designed to include mobile device access. Of the rest, ten percent of companies have no measures for addressing mobile security, thirty-nine percent are granting mobile devices access to corporate networks on an ad hoc basis and another 39 percent are integrating mobile devices into their existing fixed network security architecture.

The Economist Intelligence Unit surveyed more than 240 global company executives and conducted a number of in-depth interviews with executives across a range of industries to explore awareness of the security risks associated with the widespread adoption of mobile data solutions. The research also looked at business readiness to respond should a security threat be realised.