When you think about security, you think about your laptop, the company network, perhaps your e-mail. What you don't really think about are your mobile devices. But consider all of the things you do on those devices. You bank, you access work e-mails, files and perhaps even secure areas on the company network. Your phone or tablet is a gateway to your personal and professional life. It's also a device that's vulnerable to being lost or stolen.
Let's face it, using your personal mobile devices to do work-related tasks is convenient. So even if your company doesn't provide you with a business phone or tablet, at the very least you'll want to view your work e-mails when you're out of the office, although many people do a great deal more than that on their personal devices.
This growing trend towards Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) is increasingly supported by corporate IT departments, but with obvious concerns around securing the business information and applications that reside on the device. Particularly as these days, business use extends far beyond e-mail, with users accessing various company applications, depending on their role within the organisation.
Which bring us to how they access areas on their device. Usually a password, passcode or swipe pattern is required to unlock the device and access applications. As technological advances and more innovation find their way onto phones and tablets, so vendors are introducing stronger authentication methods like biometrics, which saw fingerprint identification being introduced as early as 2007. This took security to a whole new level as authentication relied on something that was unique to each individual user instead of a password or pattern that they chose. However, heavily security-conscious organisations are always looking for stronger authentication mechanisms and the latest and most secure form of biometric security is iris scanning.
Paulo Ferreira, Director Enterprise Mobility for Samsung South Africa, says, "Iris scanning is arguably the strongest authentication mechanism that can be used in the industry today. The patterns in your iris are very difficult to copy, it's unique, even twins don't share same iris pattern or signature. It takes biometric authentication to a whole new level."
He explains this statement: "We can do more signature pattern recognition on the iris than we can do on a fingerprint. It's all about how scanner scans your iris. The signature and patterns we can pull from an iris capture more granular detail than a fingerprint scanner can.
"Some of our customers aren't only looking at iris scanning as an alternative form of authentication, but at perhaps creating multiple factor authentication mechanisms. Instead of a user being asked for one of the above methods of authentication, they can be asked for more than one method, depending on the level of security required for that particular access. In fact, they can request two or three levels of strong authentication for some apps, while others may only require a password."
Of course, having access to this type of security technology on your mobile device goes far beyond access to work-related areas. For example if you're in an industry that has created an application that your customers can use, like a bank, it is possible to integrate your mobile device's biometric authentication capabilities into that application, to enable even higher levels of security for customers that require it. And while iris scanning is currently only available on premium model mobile phones, Ferreira is confident that ultimately the capability will filter down to other models and become more readily available.
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