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Smart Phones "Bigger Security Risk" Than Laptops
CWmike writes "A recent survey of 300 senior IT staff found that 94% fear PDAs present a security risk, surpassing the 88% who highlighted mobile storage devices as a worry. Nearly eight in 10 said laptops were an issue. Only four in 10 had encrypted data on their laptops, and the remainder said the information was 'not worth' protecting. A key danger with PDAs was that over half of IT executives surveyed were 'not bothering' to enter a password when they used their phone. A VP at the company that performed the survey said: 'Companies need to regain control of these devices and the data that they are carrying, or risk finding their investment in securing the enterprise misplaced and woefully inadequate.' Is this just iPhone fear-mongering? Do you think the passwords execs could remember would help with securing PDAs and smart phones?"
Mod parent up. Blackberries ARE better than the other PDA platforms in terms of security, because they do support this level of security 'out of the box'.
Other PDA's don't, and in most cases you can't even add it. With the BB, you can essentially set them up so that all data is end-to-end encrypted to YOUR server, and from their it can go out to retreive web pages, access address books, download documents, run applications, etc, etc. You can apply corporate filters to the web, limit applications, etc, etc all very easily.
All other PDA platforms require you to trust the carrier and the user for a significant chunk of the security. They give you exchange and imap support for example so email can be reasonably secure, but its much harder to lockdown EVERYTHING else... like blocking it so the pad web browser can't reach facebook or myspace or so poker can't be installed... blackberries make it as easy to manage PDA's as it is to manage desktops... which is to say... its a hassle. But on other platforms its not even really doable.
How easy is it to get an iphone to run through a 'VPN' so it can access an intranet site and have no or extremely limited access to the public WWW? This is a pretty common scenario for the PC's staff are provided by enterprises, but smartphones in general do no make this sort of configuration easy; in many cases its simply not possible.
In just a few days, Apple is set to release iPhone Software 2.0 (as well as maybe Hardware 2.0...) but sw 2.0 is slated to have many of the enterprise features listed above. Not to sound like an Apple commercial, but features will include:
-ActiveSync (with SSL..)
-Remote administration with remote wipe of a lost device
-Cisco VPN with RSA SecurID
And as far as the VPN question, it is pretty straight forward, just another pane in the settings menu. PPTP and IPSec.
So iPhone's release featureset wouldn't have satisfied your needs, but tune back in in a few days and see if it floats your boat.