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Research: Mobile Device Management & Security

We've seen some interesting developments between our March 2010 InformationWeek Analytics Mobile Device Management and Security survey and our February 2008 poll on the subject. Significantly more of you say security is the primary reason your organization deployed, or plans to deploy, mobile device management--73% in March vs. 52% in 2008. And 35% have rolled productivity apps out to mobile devices, compared with 27% in our last survey. But don’t get too smug: The mix of hardware you now need to worry about extends beyond smartphones to multigigabyte USB devices the size of pop tops, netbooks and now tablets. Seven mobile device vendors registered double-digit adoption levels in our poll. And as ever more novel, shiny devices captivate your end users, this expansion will accelerate--our survey shows that demand for mobility is poised to explode in multiple directions.

And yet we're still not devoting sufficient resources, given the potential for disaster.

"As mobile devices grow smarter, this is the biggest area of data leakage concern, besides cloud computing," says a principal security architect with a large IT vendor. Good luck reining in either of them. Your employees want to work and share information wherever they happen to be. Mobile utopia is the central theme of lavish ad campaigns from carriers and smartphone makers. Your users see rich ecosystems replete with slick hardware, clever applications and ubiquitous network connectivity, populated by pretty, smiling people and think, "Hey, that could be me."

And the biggest names in tech are in a bruising fight to deliver on that vision.

Reconciling the "I want my e-mail on an iPhone, and I want it now!" sentiment with the practicalities of managing multiple platforms and securing the data passing through or stored on devices, without breaking the bank, is an ongoing battle--one made more difficult by stagnant technology spending. But we need to figure it out, and fast, because as budgets loosen, that pent-up demand we mentioned could bite you. A smart response includes security policies, education and management, either via one or more homogenous platform managers or a single heterogeneous tool to administer multiple platforms from a single pane of glass.

In this report, we’ll discuss all these areas and analyze results of our recent survey, including trending select data. We'll examine platform trends, applications and their importance, and risks unique to mobile platforms, and lay out a roadmap to security.

With Richard Dreger.

Survey Name: InformationWeek Analytics Mobile Device Management & Security Survey
Survey Date: March 2010
Region: North America
Number of Respondents: 307