Facing up to the mobile revolution
- Article 26 of 33
- SC Magazine, April 2011
Whether companies are actively encouraging their employees to work on the move, or staff are simply using personal mobile devices of their own accord, security professionals face a major new headache in protecting their organisations from threats, writes Rob Buckley.
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"This way, the device becomes a presentation mechanism and the app is just a window into the organisation through which you see things," says Mark Carter, head of security at Deloitte. This can make it far easier to support different devices: rather than having to develop corporate applications that run on any number of platforms, including iOS, Android, Symbian and Windows Mobile, the organisation can simply tell employees to install the relevant virtual desktop client on their phone and run all the applications on the server.
However, virtualisation can be expensive, not just because of the server hardware and software required, but also because of licensing, resulting in high initial costs. "It's a decision that hits CIOs more and more as you start to invest in supporting mobile. However, although it's expensive at first, the economies of scale kick in and the cost diminishes per unit. With use of mobile devices increasing in the future, it's an issue in front of CIOs," says Carter.
BT's Tiller says he is aware of only two companies discussing virtualisation as a means of becoming more flexible in relation to consumerisation, rather than for other business reasons.
As a result, many organisations instead decide to deploy applications onto mobile devices. To do this, they need to consider the same things as they would when apps are deployed on more conventional devices. Proper checking of apps' security - for both those written by the organisation and those bought - is a must. To avoid the inevitable problems of support for multiple platforms, mobile enterprise application platforms such as AT&T's Workbench or Antenna's Volt, that are either hosted or on site, can be used to create, publish and manage web applications securely.
"It's essentially a native container for HTML 5 web apps," says Martin Jones, senior product manager at Antenna Software. "It enables the enterprise to have much more control of these apps by having a ring-fenced area. You can wipe individually or the whole thing - or, since the keys will expire, the need to wipe is removed."
Consumerisation will only increase alongside mobile working, which will affect not just corporations but society, too. "We're facing a big chunk of the population being always on, 24/7," says Kaspersky's Emm. "The negative side of this is that people's devices will need to be protected inside and outside the office. It's a perfect storm."
Even if an organisation doesn't feel it needs a mobile security policy now, it will do soon.
Security at the network operators
Mobile security is as much an issue for network operators as it is for their users, which is why so many of them are taking it seriously. At the simplest level, if customers have problems with their phones, they're more likely to call their network operator and expect it to fix the problem, even if the operator is not responsible for it. But as Gareth Maclachlan, COO of AdaptiveMobile, points out, malware infections and other security problems can cost operators dearly.
"One operator lost £2m over a four-day period because SMS messages were coming through as missed call alerts. When the customers hit reply, they dialled an international number at $4 a minute that was a recording of a dial tone. The operators transferred money to the satellite phone operator, and only 30 days later, when people started getting their bills, did the complaints come in," he says.
AdaptiveMobile now provides a security platform to 35 tier one mobile phone operators around the world, including some in the UK, that can monitor every SMS, MMS, email, IMS and voice message in real-time to observe customer behaviour and spot changes. "The platform can monitor a huge range of behaviours and build profiles of the subscribers. These cues help us to identify threats and actions to take," Maclachlan explains.
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