9 Android Apps To enhance Security, Privacy

(click image for larger view)

In Gartner’s latest quarterly PC sales analysis, it’s hard to overlook the giant shift clear of desktop and laptop PCs toward tablets and smartphones. Worldwide PC shipments within the second quarter were down 10.9% from the year before, marking the fifth consecutive quarter of falling sales.

U.S. government agencies are following this trend and, occasionally, even leading it. Per a Mobile Work Exchange report released in May 2013, many federal IT executives say they’ve launched new internal and customer-facing mobile applications, including apps for timecards, document sharing, inventory tracking, and weather watch and warning systems. an exceptional 59% of agencies have developed an enterprise-wide inventory for mobile devices and wireless contracts.

The excellent news is that these federal users say their agencies are realizing the advantages of access to mobile devices, including improved communication with colleagues in several locations, employee productivity and availability to constituents.

The shift towards tablets raises an incredible issue that promises to switch the info governance dynamic for many agencies. Since iPads and other tablets have limited on-device data-storage facilities, we must ask: What in regards to the data? Where is it stored and the way is it protected?

In step with the Mobile Work Exchange report, 73% of presidency respondents admit security and the power to offer protection to sensitive information across devices is the highest barrier to going mobile.

[ After two major breaches this year, that you have to wonder if the DOE is all for security. See Department Of Energy Cyberattack: 5 Takeaways . ]

So while many agencies are adopting tablets and other devices and moving to the cloud, which supports anytime/anywhere computing, doing so without the perfect data protection strategy and controls puts that data in danger.

The challenge this creates for presidency it’s significant, as only a few legacy endpoint security technologies can reliably extend their protection into the cloud. Not just this, but there are regulatory hurdles to be met on the subject of moving data into and around the cloud, in addition to storing or replicating data on mobile devices.

A report published in March from the dept of Defense inspector general’s office at the effects of BYOD on U.S. military data security found that the army command was ignorant of greater than 14,000 commercial mobile devices in active use around the Army. The report’s findings are a classic example of what happens at the data security front in very large organizations.

Clone of a big enterprise, not just do government agencies need security policies, they want the technology in place to enforce those policies and make sure the proper governance surrounding the info because it flows into, across and out of the organization. an absence of technology to both enforce the specified security policies, in addition control what happens to the info, if it is held in an area or cloud environment or maybe across a mobile device, creates an immense data exposure risk that exists across all unknown devices.

Effective data security is already a posh issue for many IT and security departments, but adding mobile access — with each of the challenges this entails — changes the ballgame significantly. As increasingly agencies — and their employees — embrace mobile access to corporate data, it’s imperative that the guidelines governance systems they employ take an information-centric option to business security.

That’s one of the the reason why encrypting the information because it is used and moved across a network, in the course of the cloud and over mobile devices, assumes significant importance. This takes the information protection aspect of security to an absolutely new level.

As we have seen, it only takes one email and attachment containing sensitive materials to fall into enemy hands to create a breach that’s difficult to contain. Given current budget pressures, the challenge of having users to willingly encrypt their data and overcoming their worries that data encryption will hamper productivity, there’s numerous resistance to correctly managing data over today’s mobile networks. However, the stakes for not adopting a more data-centric security approach are high — and growing higher — as increasingly more workers turn toward mobile devices to do their work.

Your IT team must protect data within the cloud in addition to on physical and virtual servers, PCs, and naturally mobile devices. Accordingly, we asked much from vendors during this Comprehensive Data Recovery Buyer’s Guide. Download it today. (Free registration required.)