Ensuring Security While Advancing Mobility

Beyond the challenges of ensuring that data privacy laws are observed across the globe, West IT is faced with the need to safeguard intellectual property, trade secrets, and confidential company and employee data while ensuring that we can serve our global customers. This is becoming increasingly more complex with the rapid advances in mobility and cloud computing. At West, IT is evaluating the best way to enable our employees to take advantage of these rapid advances in technology while still ensuring protection for confidential company information.

The advantages of mobility, when combined with cloud computing, pose an even greater level of risk. Every iPhone user has an iTunes account, which is essentially a private cloud for that user. As an example, inadvertently saving sensitive data to iCloud or iTunes could result in risks ranging from damages to West’s reputation to financial loss. To mitigate these risks, West IT is deploying the appropriate supporting security technologies, such as encryption and mobile device management.

Today, we most often “consume” information with our smartphones and tablet devices, and we often store receipts for expense reports or make purchases through mobile apps. In the near future, we expect that West will be using these devices to capture and create company information. This is a rapidly changing space, and West IT will continue to remain current with trends in mobile technologies as well as uses for cloud computing. Along with this, IT will be updating security standards more frequently along with the supporting infrastructure and software to ensure that our information assets remain protected.