Thursday, May 26, 2005
Your Firm's Life(blood) in Your Pocket?
Posted by Jonathon Watkins in "THOUGHT" @ 07:00 PM
"It's been dubbed the 'Mobile Manager' but PalmOne's latest mobile beastie, the LifeDrive, is set to land network managers with one of their worst nightmares. A device which is designed to suck data out of any decent Windows machine. Not only does the PalmOne LifeDrive boast a 4 GB hard drive but its software is deliberately designed to sync with a PC. Copy the entire contents of your my Documents folder is dead simple. As is syncing your emails with a Microsoft Exchange server. The INQ's heard of some firms banning iPods for similar reasons but the LifeDrive takes this threat to a new height."
The security threat posed by mobile devices is nothing new, while the proliferation of portable players with a plethora of storage means that the threat going to get much, much worse. I know a lot of folks who routinely carry around 1Gb personal USB memory sticks, have 512Mb MiniSD cards in their phones and who also bring 40Gb MP3 players to work. That's a lot of potential routes for data to escape from companies and I haven't even mentioned embedded cameras ;-). So is it time for firms to start routinely locking down USB & Firewire ports etc. for most employees, should they draconianly ban all mobile storage devices or is there another better way? What are your thoughts on the conflicting demands of security versus freedom and flexibility in the workplace?
The security threat posed by mobile devices is nothing new, while the proliferation of portable players with a plethora of storage means that the threat going to get much, much worse. I know a lot of folks who routinely carry around 1Gb personal USB memory sticks, have 512Mb MiniSD cards in their phones and who also bring 40Gb MP3 players to work. That's a lot of potential routes for data to escape from companies and I haven't even mentioned embedded cameras ;-). So is it time for firms to start routinely locking down USB & Firewire ports etc. for most employees, should they draconianly ban all mobile storage devices or is there another better way? What are your thoughts on the conflicting demands of security versus freedom and flexibility in the workplace?
