Mobility has become a top priority for IT and business leaders among organizations of all sizes, driven by the increased pressure to improve productivity across a broadening mobile workforce, the desire to become more operationally efficient, and the need to support the proliferation of smartphones and tablets in the workplace.

Exchange ActiveSync is great for "push" email synchronization with mobile devices, but as a mobile device management platform it has serious architectural and administrative limitations that leave you exposed to significant security risks. To illustrate the point, let's examine how many company’s enable access to Exchange from mobile devices.

When most people think of industries where mobile device management and security is important, financial services and healthcare immediately come to mind. While the education field is often overlooked, there is a great deal of confidential information on university servers, including financial data, student grades, medical information and much more. In addition to the need for compliance with university privacy policies, higher educational institutions are also required to comply with PCI DSS security standards for electronic payments and sometimes with HIPAA regulations as well.

It’s been a few days since the RSA Conference and I’ve had time to absorb everything that was there.  With the sessions, keynote addresses, vendor floor and the socializing, the whole conference was definitely something worth experiencing.  The conference had more than 320 companies exhibiting their tools and technologies, over 255 sessions and 540 speakers. 

The morning consisted of keynote addresses, awards and a panel discussion with the biggest names in cryptography. The opening keynote was made by RSA Chairman, Arthur Coviello. It was in part a call to arms. Art announced the Cloud Trust Authority initiative, a series of cloud-based services designed to enable organizations and cloud service providers to work together to design security into cloud initiatives. Art also commented that the cloud and virtualization will dramatically change security. No doubt, it has to. Traditional security technologies cannot scale to or adapt to the fluid nature of the cloud. This notion of change being needed in how security is implemented in a cloud model resonated throughout the rest of the day, and I’m sure will be repeated throughout the rest of the week. Art had VMware Chief Development Officer, Richard McAniff on stage with him talking about developing for a trusted cloud.