“By all means allow staff to use their smartphones to communicate on the move - using voice, text and basic email. But when it comes to risking the integrity of the company’s data, encryption at source is the best security defence possible” -- Dave Anderson, Voltage Security
Commenting on a report that shows people spend 58 minutes talking on - or staring down - at their smartphones, each and every day, Voltage Security says this indicates the shift away from computers as the end point of choice for people generally.
According to Dave Anderson, a senior director with the data-centric security provider, since this Experian US report shows that almost half of that time is spend communicating using voice and text services, this means smartphone users are now spending half-an-hour a day checking and answering emails, as well as surfing the mobile Internet.
“The report is a clear indication of the profound change in the way we interact electronically – remember, June 29th marks the sixth anniversary of when Apple launched its first iPhone and it’s also only in the last few years that Android has also become a smartphone operating system of choice,” he said.
“It’s interesting to see that, out of the almost-13,000 users that participated in the study, Android users tend to visit more Web sites, whilst iPhone users use more apps – which, of course, interact with remote servers across the Internet,” he added.
The Voltage senior director says that, for him, the key takeout from this Experian report – which has parallels with the surge in adoption of smartphones on this side of the Atlantic - is that we collectively spend more than half our phone time doing things that mobiles could not do anywhere near as well as a decade ago.
This means, he adds, that corporates must adapt their end point security strategy to a data-centric strategy in order to accommodate what has become a real BYOD phenomenon in the workplace, as most of those smartphone users – regardless of which device they own – will connect to the corporate wireless network when at their place of employment.
“The message from this report is quite clear - all companies, whether large or small, should now be encrypting their customer and critical data at the point of creation.” he said.
"Voltage's encryption and allied security technology - which us in use at over 1,000 enterprise customers, including some of the world's leading brand-name companies in payments, banking, retail, insurance, energy, healthcare and government - is a highly efficient method of encrypting data at source, since it uses a stateless technology," he added.
“By all means allow staff to use their smartphones to communicate on the move - using voice, text and basic email. But when it comes to risking the integrity of the company’s data, encryption at source is the best security defence possible.”