Mobile devices cause a rise in data breaches

A survey of 100 British companies by Good Technology has found the number of consumer devices entering the workplace doubled in six months, while 42 percent of IT managers have seen unauthorised consumer devices cause data breaches.

Andrew Jacques, vice president and general manager at Good Technology, said IT managers were under pressure to familiarise themselves with new devices, "constantly changing data plans, new platforms and apps and the security issues associated with them”.

A recent survey by Courion found that 10 percent of IT decision makers had experienced a data breach from a lost mobile device and 69 percent of organisations said that their employees were using their own mobile devices to connect to corporate networks. But Courion found that 21 percent either did not have a policy to govern use of personal mobile devices on their network, or did not know if they had one.

Commenting on its survey of 988 IT decision makers at large organisations, Dave Fowler, senior vice president of product and marketing for Courion, said that mobile devices were accepted as necessary tools for productivity in the enterprise, regardless of how they affected data security.

“That is the new reality. Companies are scrambling to keep up with the information access vulnerabilities and compliance violations created by mobile devices that access and store confidential information. The right access assurance solution can bring the same strength of protection to mobile devices that companies have deployed internally,” he said.

This article originally appeared at scmagazineuk.com