The title of a recent article on W.I.R.E.D Innovation Insights asks "How Secure Is Your Company's Information With the Mobile-Carrying Social Employee?" - The apparent one-sidedness of this 'concern' got me thinking that somewhere in all this securing data of employers, the employee's is getting compromised.
Just may be, while designing the data-security solutions the product
companies should simultaneously address another question "How secure is
the Mobile-Carrying Social Employee's Personal Information with the
Company?" - Not just for the heck of it, but so as to come-up with a
compliance boosting mutual-data security feature!
Below is the comment I posted against the above article:
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An interesting observation in the second paragraph "The
second thing that worried me was all the data on the phone, the contacts, the
texts and all the account passwords that I had fed into the various
applications and the data within those apps".... this aspect doesn't
however figure in the solution though...
Sure while employers securing their data by way of ‘remote
controlling information even after dissemination’ is probably necessary for
justifiable business reasons, the technologies employed for this purpose must
not breach the fine-line between ‘securing employers corporate data’ &
‘respecting employees social/ personal data' - as safety of personal data is an
equally big concern for the individual in question as suggested by the quoted
text above.
As a social corporate employee I personally
would hate carrying two smartphones if not for anything else, for the sake of
not sacrificing efficiency & convenience. This means my corporate mobile
will have to double up as my personal device too & I suspect I’m with the
majority in this matter. Given this and given the corporate decision makers too
are part of this BYOD environment & since ensuring compliance (by
employees) ideally should be a two-way transaction of trust, I believe
whichever company develops technologies/ products that equally address both the
above aspects will have a sure-shot winner at hand.
