How can an organisation avoid lost or stolen PDAs and smartphones compromising its corporate network? What might be best practices in this area?

The best practise comprise of many things naturally starting from MDM to physical security of the device itself. There are lot of MDM security related articles available also in this discussion forum so I will not touch those but when talking about best practises for example all S60 smartphone platform based devices for example from Nokia, Samsung and LG have a feature called device lock in them that let's the user to set a security code and time-out so that the device will lock itself without user intervention and a security code is then needed to open the device. It does not help to shut down even if you knew the PIN code for the phone. Now you would need to know the security code as well. This is very easy thing to do and extremely practical if you loose your device. Check all S60 based phones at http://www.s60.com/life/s60phones/browseDevices.do

-Mikko

I guess by deploying devices that support sufficient protection. Enterprise isn't going to rely on the user's actions - so off the top of my head:
* mandated device lock after timeout. Getting this accepted by the user is going to be a balance between short, secure timeout, and long enough not to irritate them. It should not be over-ridable by the user, though.
* Device lock after SIM card change for GSM devices
* secure remote wipe *including any storage media such as SD cards etc*
* easy technical and administrative integration into the corporate network - e.g. hook in to Active Directory et al.

Blackberrys are particularly good at this kind of stuff, but WM handsets are catching up...

Ric

Hi, the best solution is a "wipe and lock". As its name suggests, an OTA file wipes the data on the phone and prevents further use of the device. Ideally, the original data should be kept on a sepearte server for a "back up and restore" of the lost data .

Post edited by: kate stoney, at: 2007/12/10 17:52

Post edited by: kate stoney, at: 2007/12/10 17:57