Armed with his newly found communicative powers, Jim hit the road on a big sales trip that took him through multiple cities. After several weeks, there were hundreds of emails resting quietly on his device. They included contracts, sales quotes, pricing schemes, and other information you wouldn't want your competitors or customers to know about. One night, the smartphone fell out of his pocket while he was boarding a plane in a crowded airport.
Whoever finds the device will have instant access to all of Jim's emails and your corporate information. Begin security nightmare.
Shedding light on internal communications with some emails isn't the only risk here. Smartphones are often connected to back-end systems that contain proprietary enterprise data. Odds are, your execs wouldn't want that information accessible to anyone but the appropriate employees.
"Typically a rogue device is one that an employee purchases on their own," said Shari Freeman, director of product management for Sybase iAnywhere's Afaria group. "The main thing they want to do is get enterprise email and perhaps access to enterprise data. More and more companies are starting to require that if a user wants to have mobile email pushed to a device, that the device be secure, because of the confidential nature of email."
The ABC's Of Mobile Security