What About Security?

by Joseph Hunkins / Sep 19

Forget about mobile security.   Seriously.  The ship that prevents us from having a robust level of online security sailed long ago, leaving us with a choice of participating in a somewhat insecure environment, especially as we jump on and off of hotspots or insecure home networks to do our online banking.    I suppose it’s possible that I’ve just been lucky, and I certainly take the normal levels of precaution, but I think that worrying, for example, about your employees encrypting their email and surfing activity while on the road (or off the road for that matter), is an exercise in futility.

The key security holes are as much a product of an employees risky behavior as they are a product of your company’s efforts to protect everybody.    I’m obviously not suggesting you conduct any sensitive mobile computing without virus protection and firewalls, and also obviously if highly confidential information such as credit card records or medical histories is involved very high levels of security are called for, and great mobile networking precautions should be taken.

Most importantly you’ll obviously want to monitor any money related online transactions – but since you must monitor these after the mobile transaction fact anyway, trying to insure security throughout the process may be cost prohibitive.   Again obvious caveats apply, but credit cards and banking systems have fairly extensive security systems and good processes to settle online fraud already in place.

However under the normal mobile networking environments of your employees I think security issues are not so much overblown as they are outside of your control.    Outside of establishing basic common sense protocols for your workers, it may be best to simply make sure that highly sensitive informtion is not handled using mobile devices unless you’ve established a highly secure environmenent, and that normal transactions are monitored with the common sense principles you’d apply to any online activity.

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