Tech Talk: Mobility – Digital Freedom or Foe?

Mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets are transforming the way we communicate and collaborate like never before.  The convenience, ease of use, technical capabilities and mind-boggling array of apps have been pivotal to increasing productivity and customer and employee engagement.  Yet mobility comes with some caveats, such as the need to secure confidential customer and financial data.  This challenge has gained prominence this year due, in part, to the headline-grabbing news of hackers across the globe breaking into supposedly secure corporate and government databases.

According to a recent Internet Security Threat Report published by Symantec® Corporation, there were over 5,200 new security vulnerabilities discovered in 2012, with 415 of them on mobile operating systems.  When using a mobile device, you can see all information you have access to across the enterprise so it must be secure.  As security threats and vulnerabilities continue to become real through accidental and deliberate acts, we asked the following questions:  What information is really important? Who has access to it and on what devices? Where do those people and devices go with it?  Answering these questions led us to significantly increase our IT security investments for mobile devices.  And since another signature element of mobile solutions is content delivery via “the cloud”  where users connect to servers that are managed by a third party via a web browser, we also raised our investments in cloud security.

At West, we recognize that our customers place significant trust in us to ensure we protect our information assets as well as theirs. Because of this, we have established information security policies and are delivering ongoing information security training with an emphasis on mobile security.  We also have implemented tools to enforce device-level security on all smart phones and tablets, and have implemented sophisticated monitoring systems that enable us to see and make sense of security events around the world.  At West, we take information security seriously so we can be By Your Side in the digital world.