InformationWeek SMB: How To Manage Your Mobile Devices
A primer on mobile device management for SMBs. Recommended steps include: inventory employees’ devices, determine security needs, match security features to needs, etc.
“Employees have been falling in love with devices, such as Apple’s iPhone. Increasingly, they are using them to generate and store corporate information whether you have authorized them to or not. “Cell phone management has become a huge problem for many companies,” noted Jack E. Gold, principal analyst at J. Gold Associates, LLC. This change raises new security and management issues for small and midsize businesses, so what steps can IT managers take to make sure that these devices do not overwhelm them?
Step 1: Inventory Employee Mobile Devices
Employees have been using mobile phones for years to contact coworkers, suppliers, and customers. What has been changing recently are the capabilities of these devices. They now include gigabytes of storage and powerful processing functions. Consequently, the volume of company data that is being stored on them has been rising. Companies need to make sure that they understand what employees have already put on their phones. They need to conduct a mobile phone audit, so they have a management starting point.”