Peter A Clarke

In its Annual Security Report 2014 (found here) Cisco notes that businesses that allow staff to use their own mobile devices for work purposes face challenges in ensuring the organisation’s data  are secure.  Stealing data is becoming easier.

Some of the findings of of the long but very interesting report are that:

• the more smartphones, tablets, and other devices perform like traditional desktop and laptop computers, the easier it is to design malware for them.
• security teams are grappling with the ‘any-to-any problem’: how to secure any user, on any device, located anywhere, accessing any application or resource and the BYOD  trend is complicating matters.
• by October 2013 there had been a 14% rise in the number of “threat alerts” across all platforms identified in 2013 relative to 2012 as a whole.
• organisational vulnerabilities are increasing because enterprises are working through disaggregated point solutions and multiple management platform resulting in  “..a set of disparate technologies across control points that were never designed to work together. This increases the potential for the compromise of customer information, intellectual property, and other sensitive information, and puts a company’s reputation at risk.”
• trust across the internet had been diminished as a result of the details leaked of the surveillance activities of the NSA, including consumers’ trust in online businesses.