Unfortunately, employees tend to forget or disregard policies, especially mobile security policies, so they may engage in risky behavior without thinking about it. They’re generally unaware of the potential risks, and often treat their mobile device like their company PC, assuming it’s secured by IT.
There’s a lot of information floating around on the Internet. Some of it is good, but a lot of it is bad. And to make…
Should the prevalence of cyber security stories worry your company or you personally? You bet it should! The scary thing is that even with all of the media attention, there are thousands of breaches taking place daily that do not show up in the news. In many cases the hacked companies and individuals don’t even know they’ve been compromised!
Since April of this year, I’ve been using a Windows 8 phone on the Verizon network; specifically a Nokia Lumia 822. I loved it when I got it then; I’m more in love with it now that Microsoft and Nokia have released their updates.
WP8 uses the same “Live Tiles” setup as Windows 8, the OS I currently run on my laptop. If anything, the WP8 experience is everything Windows 8 on a laptop wants to be. The start screen on the phone is easy to use. The OS is blazingly fast using 4G or WiFi and there are plenty of visual themes to play with. Voice recognition is excellent and the phone takes commands and dictation well.
Windows 8 really doesn’t bring anything new to the table of advantage to the enterprise. From a productivity standpoint, why introduce change and a learning curve, steep or otherwise, that returns no net return on productivity? The new Metro “Apps” have no useful place in the enterprise and were designed primarily for the consumer market, and for administrators, locking down these apps looks daunting.
You are not going to stop BYOD from happening. Failure to actively support it will simply lead to security exposures and dissatisfied users (some undoubtedly in senior management). Moreover, unless you currently pay the mobile service charges for company-owned devices, and refuse to pay them for BYOD, IT costs are going to go up.
Windows 8 is about moving real Windows (in contrast to Windows CE derivatives such as Windows Phone) downscale — to mobile, consumer-oriented devices. The disruptive “Metro” user experience is the most visible aspect of this strategy, but only part of the big picture.
BYOD isn’t about cost reduction; it’s about responding to psychologically driven demands from end-users. Employees in today’s consumer-oriented culture expect to be able to “have it your way,” regardless of whether there is any financial benefit to the business.
The arrival of the Windows 8 Release Preview — with its corresponding app development tools — heralds a new phase in the acceptance of mobile form-factors into enterprise computing.