So, which tablet did you receive over the holiday season? Was it the Kindle Fire, the Motorola Xoom, or the iPad?

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.

As you develop your mobility strategy, start thinking about security, and begin the process of evaluating Mobile Device Management solutions (and who isn’t at the moment), it’s easy to get lost in the weeds, spending time talking about features, functionality, life cycle management and device support. Every once in a while, it makes sense to pause and remember what the primary goals of Mobile Device Management are. 

The Nielsen Company recently released metrics about consumer marketshare by operating system for smartphones in the US. I’m not sure why some people are surprised by these numbers however, I don’t think the division of marketshare is the key story. If you are wondering what they looked like, you can see the report here: Nielsen Report. For the record, the top 3 are Android (29%), Apple (27%) and RIM (27%). Behind these numbers is something bigger, with greater impact on all companies regardless if they are supplying smartphones to their workers or if they allow workers to bring in their personal devices.

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.

First day at the RSA Conference and it’s off to a great start.  As expected, one of the big topics everyone is talking about is cloud computing.  It helps that the conference started with the Cloud Security Alliance Summit, but it was bigger than just that.  The talk in the halls was all about cloud computing, as well.  From data warehouse vendors, to multi-factor authentication vendors, to consumers from all walks of life, cloud computing is on everyone’s mind.