BYOD forces IT to manage the fine balance between protecting company data and infringing on user privacy. One of the holy grails of mobility is the ability to cleanly separate business data from personal data and there are many technologies vying to lead the way.
A popular approach to data security is to confine data to app containers and encrypted wrappers that control how data is used however this method usually relies on some local data storage and is therefore not as secure as most system admins would like.
As companies become more knowledgeable about the risks that BYOD presents to their corporate data security there is likely to be more experimentation with alternate approaches through 2012 that focus on virtualisation and cloud-based solutions.
We are also likely to see closer integration between mobile apps and the cloud and wherever possible there won’t be any data that is residing locally on the device.
There is already an established pecking order within the virtualisation technology market and the coming year will and the security appeal of virtualisation will soon see the good sorted from the bad in the marketplace.
While virtualisation and the cloud will certainly become a more popular solution for data security, it still may not provide all of the answers for some companies.
A good approach for developing an appropriate data security methodology is to ensure that all of the risks are clearly understood before moving forward with implementing a solution – it only takes one slip-up for important data to end up in the wrong hands.