There’s an interesting article in the October issue of the Economist that spotlights the challenges that large enterprise has to manage the use of technology in their workforce. It paints an interesting – albeit somewhat disturbing — picture of the state of technology at work today. The days of corporate-wide devices and programs are disappearing quickly as today’s technosavvy employees are bringing their own applications and devices to the office.

While the evolution of our mobile society certainly falls on the good side of the equation, it also has its ramifications for the IT staffs that serve them. As the article states several research studies show that the use of personal devices to access business information has not only grown sharply, but continues to do so exponentially. While making the people who run the companies more accessible and productive, it also opens doors to security breaches and mobile malware for the company’s infrastructure. To make matters worse, the research shows that while many people would never go to bed at night with their doors unlocked, they don’t consider password protecting it – or if they do, it’s combination rivals the 1234 level of difficulty. And that’s just asking for trouble.

CIO’s are recognizing that rather than trying to inhibit the use of various technologies and devices, they should take steps to put reasonable security on them and let their staff play to their strengths. Virtual desktops that allow people to use devices but maintains all the data on a remote server behind a firewall are becoming en vogue, as well as software that enables IT departments to not only manage a wide range of mobile devices, but also to monitor what devices are accessing their proprietary networks.

The other concern this raises is data protection. If employees can move data to these new devices, what sort of data protection is in place. Inside the corporate environment, there may be good firewalls, antivirus, and data backup in place, but what happens when that same device becomes connected to say — the Wireless Network of the Chattanooga Tennessee Metropolitan Airport Authority? At that point your corporate information no longer has the data protection that you may need. Backup and disaster recovery solutions are a part of what is required. Data encryption, data security and other data protection mechanisms are also needed. We’ll be covering these ideas in the GDV Data Protection Blog over the next few weeks.

The article is a great read and accurately portrays the challenges facing corporate IT departments and the solutions they are deploying. Read it in its entirety here.