MWC 2012: Symantec Survey Confirms Mobility Trend

Symantec has released its 2012 State of Mobility Survey in time for Mobile World Congress in Barcelona next week. The main message is that 71 percent of companies are discussing deploying their own mobile apps while a third have already done so.

The growth in mobile device adoption, Symantec said, is rapidly establishing them as critical business tools. As a security specialist, what concerns the company is the data being carried around rather than the hardware.

Data is key, not hardware

On behalf of Symantec, Applied Research interviewed 6,275 organisations of all sizes in 43 countries, with 200 responders based in the United Kingdom.

The report showed that 59 percent of respondents are now relying on mobile devices for line-of-business applications, another sign that mobility has graduated to mainstream status. And also a cause for security concerns.

Three quarters of the sample said that maintaining a high level of mobile security is a high priority and 41 percent identified mobile devices as one of the top three IT risks – which, when aggregated, made it the top risk cited. Concerns expressed were wide-ranging – from lost and stolen devices, data leakage, and unauthorised access, to strains placed on corporate resources and the spread of malware onto the company network from mobile devices.

Greg Day, EMEA security CTO and director of Security Strategy at Symantec, told TechWeekEurope that the main driver for these concerns was the occurrence of some kind of incident. He added that bring-your-own-device (BYOD) initiatives were adding regulatory issues to the security concerns.

“If an employee uses their own phone, particularly in Europe, it brings up issues of liability,” Day said. “If Angry Birds doesn’t work well with a corporate app, who is liable? The user or the IT department? There is also the issue that the IT department in some countries would not be able to inspect any personal data on the phone when trying to fix the problem.”

Around half of the companies asked said that they allow employees to use their company phones for personal use but just less than half favoured a BYOD strategy.

Though 75 percent of the UK companies surveyed said they saw productivity gains after implementing tablets and smartphones, Day pointed out that the larger corporates were less convinced than smaller companies.

The cost of remedying security incidents can be significant , Symantec said. With mobile devices now enmeshed with critical business processes and data, the average annual cost of mobile incidents for enterprises, including data loss, damage to the brand, productivity loss, and loss of customer trust is $429,000 (£273,000) for a large enterprise and $126,000 (£80,000) for small businesses.

An interesting finding related to social media use, although half of the sample said that their users were currently running social media apps on their devices, the projected figure for the next year fell to 44 percent. Day put this down to a general concern about company information being leaked from the device – either knowingly or through the phishing and malware prevalent in these systems. He added that many businesses are coming to the view that social network access should only be given to those whose jobs show a clear business driver for it.

Despite these concerns and costs, the risks are seen to be worth taking when the benefits are taken into account, the report concludes. Companies are now working to implement security measures that will rein in these risks to ensure the safety of corporate information.

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