A recent McAfee report on mobility and security highlights that businesses are now operating in a heterogeneous mobile environment where BlackBerry is no longer the standard. Traditionally the IT had to just deal with a homogeneous desktop PC environment. But the BYOD trend is forcing them to manage mobile devices from multiple OEMs such as Apple, RIM, Samsung, Nokia, etc. running on disparate operating systems such as iOS, Android, Windows Mobile, and Bada.

The survey reports that introduction of these new, unsecured devices is creating a security hole for the organizations and many IT and security professionals have recently undergone a wave of securing corporate infrastructure, largely driven by compliance.

Device loss and mobile malware: Top BYOD risks

McAfee report on Mobility and Security highlights that the greatest security concern for IT professionals and end-users is losing their mobile devices - four in 10 organizations have had mobile devices lost or stolen cases and half of lost/stolen devices contain business critical data. And more than one third of mobile device losses have had a financial impact on the organization.

Maliciously modified apps are becoming a popular vector for infecting mobile devices and is posing a major threat in an enterprise environment, with employees bringing their own devices which are not only used for corporate data access but is also used for personal work.

Shantanu Ghosh, VP and MD, India Product Operations, Symantec highlighting this fact, says, “In the past year, the malware attacks on mobile devices have become more frequent and prevalent. The latest Symantec Internet Security Threat Report XVI documented a 42 percent increase in mobile vulnerabilities, identifying over 163 that could be used to gain partial or complete control over devices running popular mobile platforms. Some of the methods used in mobile-specific attacks include web-based and network-based attacks, malware, social engineering attacks, resource and service-availability abuse, malicious and unintentional data loss and attacks on the integrity of the data.”

BYOD forcing overhauling legacy security policies

To tackle the challenges, a consumerized IT environment brings with it, CIOs would need to anlayze the existing security policies with respect to the fresh set of security risks that BYOD brings in.

On the need to overhaul the current security strategy within an enterprise, Kevin LeBlanc, Sr. Director of Product Marketing, McAfee, says, “Legacy security policies and processes certainly need to be pulled out and reviewed as the important point to note is that consumer devices are already accessing data on nearly all networks and have been doing so for some time.”

To manage the BYOD linked security challenges, CIOs across the globe are evaluating various technologies ranging from leveraging their desktop virtualization environment to enable secure access to the corporate data through employee-owned devices; adopting dual persona phones that have two logical partitions – one for professional and other for personal usage with the IT having complete control over the professional partition; implementing centralized remote locate, track, lock, wipe, backup and restore facilities to retrieve and restore corporate data on a lost or stolen mobile device and more.

Organizations like Wipro, Essar and Citrix have already rolled out a BYOD policy along with a strong security strategy enabling a large chunk of its employees to use the devices of their choice in the enterprise environment but in a highly secure manner.

To know more about these emerging technologies that would aid enterprises  to address the security challenges and to understand how companies who have already rolled out a BYOD policy are ensuring security, read the March Issue of InformationWeek