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CIO Questionnaire: PDAs and SmartPhones require a lot of maintenance

More and more employees are using PDAs and SmartPhones, so-called handhelds. The expense of installing and maintaining the devices is large. And security incidents pile up. Likely, for this reason, many enterprises are planning to invest in security and management solutions. This comes out of the security study this year by our technology partner Ubitexx.

The evaluation shows: In small and intermediate-sized enterprises (KMUs), the number of handhelds is increasing. More than 100 devices are coming into use, above all in the industrial and financial sectors, while the public administration gets along with a piece count of units up to 100. More and more of these handhelds are devices that are largely maintained by the company’s IT department as well. For example, in the financial sector 45 per cent of those questioned say that all handhelds are provided and supported by the IT department.

For the platforms, the Windows mobile is still the first choice. Admittedly, the use of Blackberrys is increasing. Windows mobile is achieving growth in small companies, while Symbian has to concede sensitive losses in this market segment.

Email and the administration of PIM data still dominate in the use of handhelds – and this occurs independently of sector and enterprise size. Mobile navigation and processing of office documents is not as important in the daily company routine. Live email servers are relevant for large enterprises. Above all in industry, in the financial and service industry, significant growth rates are only recently appearing.

Meanwhile, for small/intermediate sized companies and large enterprises, security incidents are increasing. For small/intermediate sized companies, there was a volatile increase of 10 to 29 per cent. In large enterprises, security problems have even doubled (from 26 to 50 per cent). The most frequent problems: Device loss (42 per cent), data theft (34 per cent), lack of stability (20 per cent) and unexplained crashes (32 per cent). Many companies have no knowledge of security incidents. Applicable here: The more handhelds, the less knowledge of incidents.

The favorite means of increasing security: Data encryption and authentication. Around a quarter of the companies encountered absolutely no knowledge of how to improve the security status.

Scarcely anyone managed user rights by means of supplemental software

Also, many enterprises are careless with user rights. Only a small portion managed these rights by means of supplemental software, whereas just a third protected only limited access. Primarily, the large enterprises relied on internal guidelines to manage user rights. These guidelines extended onto certain settings and the blocking of unauthorized software downloads.

The expenditure for the support and administration of handhelds is large. Put together it adds up to a lot. It takes on average eight minutes per SmartPhone or PDA until they are equipped with password protection. On average, IT requires almost a quarter hour to encrypt the data. Nearly ten per cent of all enterprises need more than an hour for the VPN setup. Every fifth company requires over 20 minutes for the setup of PIM adjustment. Even the setup of email-push represents a relatively high expenditure: Approximately 17 minutes.

Above all, large enterprises, industrial and financial sectors desire central administration. Remarkably, Ubitexx principally found the time that is estimated for ongoing support of handhelds per device and month: One and a half hours. The companies with 500 to 1,999 handhelds had the highest support expenditures. Each PDA consumes 99 minutes per month.

The companies questioned in the study also revealed a lot about their investment plans for SmartPhones and PDAs. Scarcely a third want to take money for security into their hands. A clear tendency may be recognized there: The larger the enterprise, the more is invested in security and

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Press review

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management solutions for handhelds. Altogether, 45 per cent of the enterprises plan ongoing investments in the range of 5,000 to 20,000 euros for all branches. So the rule of thumb applies: The more PDAs an enterprise employs, the higher the investment.

Ubitexx questioned 401 enterprises, officials and public administrators for the “PDA and SmartPhone Security Study 2007.” Target groups were commercial and IT decision makers as well as system administrators.

Source: http://www.cio.de/knowledgecenter/security/846151/index.html