BYOD security: a standards dilemma
If there’s one thing the mobile industry is known for is standards. There’s a lot of them. In networking technology you have multiple Wi-Fi standards in use, 802.11 a, b, g, n, ac. In wide area wireless there are GSM, CDMA, WCDMA, LTE. And for mobile OSes you have iOS, Android, QNX, Windows Phone, et al.
The problem for mobile operating systems is that there are too many standards–and none that have the weight in the market to become de facto (as driven by adopters), just like what happened in the PC world when it was Microsoft vs. IBM (who won that one?).
When enterprises could dictate their own individual standards, this wasn’t an issue. But in today’s world of BYOD, this is only getting worse, especially when it comes to mobile software and app management. Each mobile platform has its own app Software Development Kit (SDK) and with consumerisation, very little thought has gone into securing and managing these consumer apps for enterprise users. But as enterprise users adopt these apps for work, this needs to change.
