(Editor's note: In this guest essay, James Bindsiel, Vice President of Client Support Services, at GlobalScape, examines the progression of risky technologies embraced by workers. GlobalScape supplies systems for safely sending data over the Internet.)
The desire of employees to access personal email from the office led to a lot of sleepless nights for CIOs in the 1990s.
I still recall a discussion I had with a chief information officer at a large financial institution who vowed that his organization would never allow office email systems to communicate outside of his IT environment.
A short time later, personal email faded as a top-level concern, replaced by USB drives and other removable, and easily concealable, media.
Today, Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) aspirations cause sleepless nights for execs in charge of security.
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| James Bindsiel is a VP at GlobalScape(Photo: GlobalScape) |
Technology adoption is moving faster than security, as mobile devices, social media, and the cloud become commonplace. Regardless of the risks, the genie clearly is out of the bottle when it comes to BYOD adoption.
A PricewaterhouseCoopers study found that 88% of consumers use a personal mobile device for both personal and work purposes. This adoption rate is indicative of an irresistible force that should be properly channeled and adjudicated, not denied.
Enterprises must work with industry to solve the primary security and other risk management issues associated with BYOD, just as they did with personal email and USB drives before.
What is needed is a combination of policy and standards development, technology advances, and employee education.
Breaches like whistleblower Edward Snowden's use of a thumb drive to abscond with highly sensitive intelligence information from the National Security Agency's PRISM surveillance program will continue to occur.
Even the most hardened systems potentially can be defeated by a highly motivated insider threat.
However, this is not a reason for enterprises to abandon the considerable, and even revolutionary, capabilities that ultimately will appear in a form that generally meets the risk management requirements.
We all should keep in mind that the considerable business advances made during the Information Age come with a price. If the past pattern holds true, BYOD concerns will be seen as "so yesterday" and will have been supplanted by a new wave of IT security issues a few years hence.
The genie will continue to work her magic with or without you.
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