South African business should take its cue from its North American counterpart, which has made gaining control over wireless environments a top business priority.
According to recent survey of 1 500 telecom decision-makers from Forrester Research, enterprises rank setting wireless policy and centralising management of mobile devices as the top two telecoms initiatives for 2006.
Controlling access to personal devices such as smartphones and PDAs should be a top priority for South African companies of all sizes, according to Cory de Villiers, business development manager at Research in Motion.
"Malicious interception of data on the corporate network while a user is sending and receiving messages and accessing corporate data wirelessly using a PDA is a real risk," notes De Villiers, adding that without an effective security model, a company might expose sensitive corporate data, with financial and legal implications.
This threat also featured prominently in Gartner`s latest Cyberthreats Hype Cycle 2006 report, which cautioned "unmanaged devices may contain malicious code, may not be patched, and may place the enterprise network and managed devices at risk".
Gartner`s advice to business is to ensure that all devices, managed or unmanaged, comply with some minimum level of policy before they are allowed to connect, using network access control solutions.
This, however, is easier said than done. "With the ever-increasing array of software, hardware and network choices available to businesses today, it is more difficult to develop an IT policy that will scale and evolve while maintaining a balance with manageability and security," notes De Villiers.
In his presentation at the ITWeb Mobile & Wireless 2006 conference, which takes place on 10 and 11 October, De Villiers will offer advice on how IT departments should go about building effective IT policies - without compromising manageability and security for mobile devices.
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