Everyone’s Talking About It
The likelihood is these days that if you are reading this on a mobile device, it’s running iOS and that it’s either a device provided by your organisation or that you have had setup to receive your emails and generally use in your daily work life (BYOD).
So why is iOS not fit for business, if it’s widely adopted and allows people to complete all the day-to-day tasks you need for work? Well here are some reasons why it might pay to think about how much you trust iOS for work.
iOS is a single sign on system, no user profiles, this assumes you are the only user of the device. However in many cases we share our devices, not with colleagues but with our children. This places all the data on our device in the hands of people least likely to understand the value and security implications of it being shared.
But more important than that, the business data we hold on our devices, even in our mailboxes, could cause companies serious embarrassment or financial loss and yet they have little or no control of the data once it’s on the employee’s device. Deleting the user’s access to mailboxes doesn’t automatically remove the data from their device. Add to that downloaded files, pictures taken at work, access to company Twitter, Facebook and other services and things start to look very scary.
The good news is that it’s been an issue with mobile devices long before iOS, and many software vendors and Apple do offer tools that large corporate businesses can use to control user devices. However these come at a cost either directly or in supporting the technology required. Shared-iPad has already gone some way to giving us user profiles but currently is aimed at the education market and iPads alone. This feature may however be evolved in future releases of iOS.
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