70% of Canadian companies don’t know how their employees use their phones at work, raising serious security concerns.
SOTI in Ontario surveyed IT managers at 350 companies across the country to find out how they manage their employees’ phones. The answer from 70% of them: We simply don’t manage them.
This is an IT security issue for these companies and their employees as well, since the work-related data that people handle on their phones may be poorly protected. It can fall into the hands of people with bad intentions, and as we know that many criminals rely on social hacking to recover content of this kind, this opens a loophole in computer security in the broader sense.
In this same survey, SOTI also discovered that 58% of Canadian businesses that responded had a fleet of mobile devices that was too large for them to manage adequately.
43% say they don’t have the financial resources to monitor what people do with their phones, even if it’s provided by their employer. Finally, the inability to properly integrate mobility into their daily activities delays digital transformation for half of the companies surveyed.
This is a major challenge, and it comes in three stages. First, Canadian companies find themselves at risk due to a lack of regulation of what their employees can and cannot do with their professional cell phones. Hence, employees themselves neglect their own safety and the safety of their colleagues. Finally, affected companies are likely to lose opportunities to increase their productivity by not taking into account the potential of IT mobility in their activities.
