Personal mobile devices

I was recently invited to a roundtable event to discuss the results of some research sponsored by Sourcefire. Part of the survey results concerned the use of personal mobile devices, which seems to be a hot topic with many of our clients. Here's a summary of the findings:

• 69 percent of UK employees use their own personal devices for work-related purposes, and 71 percent move data on and off the corporate network via these devices, and almost all carry out activities that could put company data at risk. 96 percent of senior managers and directors use personal devices for work tasks.

• 83 percent of employees admit such actions pose a risk to their organisation’s IT security, but if banned, 1 in 3 would just carry on using them regardless. In fact, 27 percent believe the company should be grateful that they are so conscientious.

• 63 percent of senior managers / directors use their personal devices to move information off the corporate network and 95 percent of people use their personal devices to carry out activities that could put data at risk – such as Internet shopping and social networking.

• 98 percent of employees also have a personal email account and during the last 12 months, 1 in 4 employees have used it to achieve work-related tasks. The most common being to send urgent emails when the corporate email has been down (18 percent) whilst 12 percent have used it to receive legitimate work documents that were being blocked by the company firewall.

It looks like we'll all be in the security business for a long time to come!