As the rate of stolen mobile devices has increased, the average time for IT departments to respond to this security threat has also grown, according to a Kaspersky Lab survey of global IT security professionals.
The report found that more than one-third of employees (38 percent) take up to two days to notify their employers of stolen mobile devices, and 9 percent of employees wait three to five days. The percentage of employees who notified their employers the same day the incident occurred decreased from 60 percent to 50 percent from 2013 to 2014.
The cause of this delay is employees becoming slower to notify their employers of missing devices, with only half of employees reporting theft quickly. "I suspect there is some embarrassment and or fear of reporting a lost, or perhaps stolen device," Mark Bermingham, director of global B2B product marketing for Kaspersky Lab, told eWeek. "Employees will often spend time, which ends up being critical time searching for and hoping to recover the device before giving up and reporting to your organization."
Across businesses that experienced mobile device theft, 19 percent said the device theft resulted in the loss of business data, meaning businesses have approximately a one-in-five chance of losing data if a corporate mobile device is stolen.
The survey also found that the rate of mobile device theft overall has continued to climb over the years, with 25 percent of companies experiencing the theft of a mobile device in 2014, a significant increase from the 14 percent reported in 2011. However, as stolen devices become more common, employees appear to be responding more slowly, with only half of employees in 2014 reported a stolen device on the same day the incident occurred.
The growing prevalence of stolen mobile devices may be a contributing factor to employee apathy, since a stolen smartphone might now be seen as a somewhat common occurrence, and not a rare crisis that demands attention. "I’d hope the trend would improve, but to accomplish this more training and expectation setting needs to occur between organizations and employees when dispensing and or activating BYOD mobiles," Bermingham said. "Some of this training needs to focus on the importance of speed in reporting a misplaced device, which may actually be lost or stolen." He noted that often, with the right administrative tools in place, like remote lock and find and misplaced device can more easily be retrieved. "
Additionally, in the event of loss remote wipe becomes critical and in this case the sooner the better," he said. "Enforcing policies like required passwords can also help to bolster security for events where devices are lost or stolen by making it more difficult for data and or sensitive business information to be extracted from these devices."
When looking at behaviors of employees in specific regions, North American employees are the slowest to respond based on 2014 survey data, with only 43 percent of North American employees reporting a stolen device on the same day as the incident.
The Asia-Pacific region saw the biggest change year-over-year with only 47 percent of employees reporting same-day notification in 2014, a drop from 74 percent in 2013.
However, the rate of mobile device theft varied significantly across regions. The Middle East reported the lowest rate of mobile device theft by far, with 8 percent of businesses reporting an incident, followed by 15 percent in Japan and Russia.
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The bandwidth needs of the enterprise have grown exponentially over the past few years, and that growth isn’t showing any signs of stopping. Cloud services, mobile access and increased video needs will place even greater demands on the enterprise’s bandwidth. Gartner group offers a look at just how much those demands will increase between now and 2017, and offers four ideas about how the enterprise can adapt its networks to meet the growing demands for more and more capacity.
Here are the immediate challenges that the enterprise is going to face, according to the conclusions of a recent Gartner report:
Greater cloud demands. Users with desktop and mobile devices are going to demand an increasing amount of bandwidth usage. Uplink capacity, which has traditionally been much lower than downlink capacity, will need to be ramped up to meet this greater demand. This will depend, to some degree, on the particular needs of the enterprise’s applications.More devices. In addition to accessing cloud resources, the number and kind of personal machines, devices and other things that will connect to enterprise networks is going to increase, adding to the overall background traffic in the enterprise – even during idle periods.More and more video. Video use – for both personal and professional reasons – has been rapidly increasing over the past few years. The increase will continue, but at a more modest rate than in the past. HD video via WAN will increase bandwidth needs.
There are also some recommendations in the report that enterprises can use to be prepared for the next three years:
Talk about the growth of network use and bandwidth with your users and your business units. This is especially important for cloud and video applications. Budgets should be linked to policies and usage agreements.Policies and technical mechanisms should be implemented that will help to either optimize or even limit the video and backup traffic that occurs via the WAN and on the cloud.Implement network capacity, topology and service levels. This will allow the enterprise to support its growth with affordability. VPNs, for example, can support smaller sites and offload certain types of traffic.Reduce stored backup and video traffic through various WAN optimization strategies. Develop those strategies with cloud-hosted content in mind, rather than with content stored in your data centers.
Increasing bandwidth demands aren’t a new problem, and they’re not going away. Make sure your enterprise is ready to deal with the coming changes over the next few years.
