Whilst devices increasingly resemble mini-PCs, their security is almost certainly behind that of an average computer. This doesn’t matter much to you if your employees simply want to use one to keep in contact with their friends, but it is a problem if they use it for work, because these devices can be much more vulnerable to hackers than a laptop.

Cybercriminals are increasingly targeting mobile devices in the hope of stealing the owner’s banking details. But if they hack into one of your staff’s devices they might unwittingly find a wealth of confidential business data stored on it that could be far more valuable on the black market than the user’s credit card number.
It would be very embarrassing for your firm to admit to its biggest client that you have lost an iPad containing some of its confidential data. But firms have just as much of a legal responsibility to keep people’s private data secure on their employees’ mobile devices as they do on their own IT servers.

Read our top tips on tightening up security on the use of mobile devices in your firm:

• Encourage all your staff to use the same device - it’s much simpler for you to keep on top of security updates for one manufacturer’s phones and tablets.
• View a mobile device as a company PC or laptop - encourage your employees to use a login on their mobile device that is at least the same strength as that on their work computer and to change it regularly, just like on their office PC.
• Act quickly if a device is lost - the simplest and most effective method of eliminating any security risk to your firm is to wipe a device if it is lost. It’s easy to do: you simply send it a message to delete all the data it contains. But you must tell your staff members that this is what you will be forced to do if they lose a device which they also use for work. You should also spell out what that means: that doing so would erase all their personal files, such as their music and photo collections.

A breach of personal data can be a major event to businesses of all sizes. You should be continually on the lookout for potential threats and ways to ensure the data your business holds, stays safe wherever it is stored.

Source: First published on Informed, the Hiscox small business blog, in April 2013