MOBILE DEVICE SECURITY CONSIDERATIONS FOR SMALL-SIZED AND MEDIUM-SIZED ENTERPRISE BUSINESS MOBILITY (ENG)

MOBILE DEVICE SECURITY CONSIDERATIONS

FOR SMALL-SIZED AND MEDIUM-SIZED ENTERPRISE

BUSINESS MOBILITY

(http://www.emeraldinsight.com)

(Rafika Aistya Adiyan / 1534010036)

SMEs technology adoption

SMEs are very important to the economies of most countries. SMEs play a major  role in the USA in terms of the number or enterprise and the number of employees.

Economic growth is impacted by SMEs in several ways. The presence of SMEs encourages large enterprises to outsource some of their activities to smaller than firms thus increasing business opportunities (Audretsch, 2001).

Advantage for innovatife SMEs who quickly adopt emerging technologies revolve around four keys aspects, all of which lead to quicker decision-making (Pattern and Passerini,2007) :

a.    Embedded technology. SMEs are not constrained by inflexible and legacy IT infrastructures technology, which make it easier to adopt newer technologies.

b.    Size. Organizational size and flexibiliy make it easier to implement new technologies since there are fewer employees with specialized function roles to consider and train.

c.    Processes. Although often informal, SME processes are usually fluid and easily adaptable to new situations. Employees generally know each other and are aware to enterprise business goals.

d.    Workplace. Dynamic worksplaces and workforces require the latest mobiliy features and tools to give their employees the capability to work from anywhere, anytime.

The growth of business mobility phones and devices

Smartphones now account for more than 50 percent of mobile phones in the USA and continue to sell at a brisk pace, accounting for over 75 percent of the device sold in late 2012 (Chetan-Sharma, 2013). The average number of mobile devices per household was five and over 6 percent of household had 15 or more devices (Chetan-Sharma, 2013). With business mobility changing the ways people work, enterprises are becoming more aware that they require a mobility security strategy.

Security recommendations

a.    Mobile device management

Mobile device management (MDM) is software or hardware that is used to manage and secure mobile devices in the workplace, such as smartphones and tablets. MDM solutions are primarily deployed as in-house server based solutions or as a clo ud-based Software as a Service (SaaS).

b.    Recommendations for SMEs

Device-oriented recommendations are concepts that should be applied to the mobile device that involve the operating system and applications that come with the device. User-oriented recommendations are concepts the user of the device should follow and management-oriented recommendations are concepts management should employ in the business.

Conclution

The biggest difference between large enterprise security and SME security is that the smaller firms have limited or no IT staff and considerably smaller IT budgets. A SME may not be able to implements VPNs with radius servers, perform deep packet sniffing, or completely control the data.