Is Allowing Employees Remote Access a Security Threat?
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As use of mobile devices by employees increases, businesses are struggling to ensure corporate data accessed via smartphones, laptops and cloud services are secure, new research shows.
A study conducted by the Courion Corp. found that two of every three large enterprises have employees who are connecting their own personal mobile devices to the corporate network – but less than a quarter have a policy governing the devices' use or have made it known whether such a policy exists.
While the survey of nearly 1,000 IT professionals showed them to be fairly confident in their ability inside the company's walls to control access to company resources, just 40 percent of them felt the same about employees accessing through mobile devices, and only 34 percent had confidence in controlling those who used cloud-based services.
The survey also looked at businesses as a whole, determining that not having proper policies on the use of mobile devices and cloud services can be costly. Nearly one in 10companies admitted to having had a data breach as a result of a lost mobile device.
“Mobile devices, whether iOS phones or tablets or an Android smartphone, are now accepted as necessary tools for productivity in the enterprise, regardless of how they affect data security," Dave Fowler, senior vice president of product and marketing for Courion, said in a prepared release. “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 findings were based on the responses of 988 IT decision-makers at large enterprises, 73 percent of which have more than 1,000 employees.
