Mobile Unified Communications Featured Article

A recent SANS survey that analyzed how organizations manage risk around their end user mobile devices found that lack of awareness is creating chaos in the enterprise as companies move to adopting Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) strategies.

Only 9 percent of the organizations that participated in the survey were fully aware of the devices accessing corporate resources, while half of the survey respondents were vaguely or fairly aware of the mobile devices accessing their resources.

Less than 20 percent of organizations that were part of the survey are using end point security tools. Among them, many depend on agent-based tools rather than agent-less ones.

Mobile devices have encroached enterprise communications infrastructure in large scales, with more than 60 percent of organizations allowing their staff to bring their own devices. With this type of permissiveness, policies and controls are even more important to help our environments secure, according to SANS survey author Kevin Johnson.

"Another interesting note (that aligns with what we saw on the vendor side at the RSA Security (News - Alert) Conference in March) is that organizations are reaching for everything at their disposal to manage this risk," said Deb Radcliff, executive editor, SANS Analyst Program, in a statement. "Among them are user education, MDM, logging and monitoring, NAC and guest networking, and configuration controls."

In a significant development in the industry, Cisco (News - Alert) said it has plans to secure personal devices of its employees. A Cisco report found that more than 40 percent of college students and young employees said they would accept a lower-paying job that had more flexibility with regard to device choice and mobility than a higher-paying job with less flexibility, so Cisco is looking to help meet those demands.

The BYOD solution provides Prime Assurance Manager and Prime Infrastructure, which help IT professionals understand application performance from a user perspective, accelerate troubleshooting and lower operating costs.