Rethinking Security for the Mobile Era

Earlier today at the WebSumit, Bob Tinkler the CEO and President of MobileIron, who are one of the leaders in enterprise mobility management, gave a great talk on rethinking security for the mobile era.

We are now living in an era where B.C. and A.D. now means something completely different, ‘Before Cloud’ and ‘Advanced Data’. Before Cloud, was a time where data was only stored behind a corporate firewall and Advance Data is where data can be stored like a Martini, anytime, anyplace and anywhere. As a result of B.C. and A.D. the enterprise boundary is collapsing and the old security model is changing.

The old security model was essentially a bug fix for Microsoft as the majority of computers ran on Microsoft operating systems. In the era of mobile we are now dealing with multiple OS’s and in some cases its multiple versions of an OS, please stand up Android, as well as different policy and access controls.

We are now also seeing two different types of security issues, ‘Car Crashes’ and ‘Shark Attacks’, and they are named after the media coverage they will get. Car crashes are data losses which don’t get much media coverage compared to shark attacks which are cyber security hacks that get major media coverage.

We should also be now moving to a trust model where you:

• Trust the device
• Trust the user
• Trust the software
• Trust the OS
• Trust the connection that you connect with