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Systems Integration With (Employee?) Smartphones
By Michael Marr
Expert Author
Article Date: 2010-10-07
At the heart of every decision is information. The more information a decision maker has, the presumably better decision they can make. It is this fact that has driven information technology into delivering as much information as possible to a small as device as possible. The smartphone is the current culmination of those efforts (with the tablet following closely behind).
How long, then, until we have all of our employees integrated with our information systems via mobile devices?
For sometime now, companies have harnessed the capability of mobile phones and supplied key decision makers and executives smartphones integrated with company information systems. Some common applications integrated into smartphones include: email, contacts, documents, files, etc. Having all of these items available at the fingertips is valuable not only to top-level executives, but also to lower level employees such as sales and marketing personnel. Thus, mobile integration has potentially large benefits.
With company supplied devices, we are able to control all aspects of the software and capabilities on the phone, especially, but not limited to, security. Thus, we lose our current way of handling this security when we begin support any employee's smartphone. The biggest way we can control security on mobile devices that we won't have direct control over is via server side authentication. The less information we allow these devices to store, the more we can rely on server side securities and authentication to protect our data. From the server that these devices will access, we can filter out and apply access control based on the originating device's unique identifiers. Thus, each device, regardless of operating system or hardware, will register its particular information with the server, and permissions assigned based on the user registering said hardware. We would also likely pair this with a password to access these applications. Mobile devices, however, provide an additional security risk in that they are easily lost or stolen. Like any device, mobile phones can are easily hacked when in the hands of an unauthorized user.
Thus, in the end, we have to evaluate that familiar issue: security versus benefits. As physical access to any device will always be susceptible to hacking, we should discount mobile devices' ease of loss and begin focusing on integration of our systems (and the related security) into mobile platforms. The next issue: what platform(s) do I support? We'll save that for a later discussion.
About the Author:
Michael Marr is a IT staff Writer for WebProNews.
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