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Posted on July 5th, 2012 in Internet Safety, Vulnerabilities by Simply Security | Be the first to comment | Tags: Internet Safety, Vulnerabilities

The flexibility of personal portable devices has made them a tantalizing option for companies looking to cut costs.

The flexibility of personal portable devices has made them a tantalizing option for companies looking to cut costs. The proliferation of BYOD (bring your own device) initiatives has made mobile technology commonplace in the office, allowing remote access and 24-hour connectivity to business data infrastructure necessary to complete job-related tasks.

Not all IT departments are taking adequate steps to safeguard data from outside attacks, but more troublesome, as a report published recently by the Washington Times shows, is that the sheer volume of third-party access created by BYOD subscribers is jeopardizing maintenance and server security.

The article in the Washington Times covered a study by Softchoice, a leading IT information provider, which stated that service outages were becoming more common for businesses with underdeveloped endpoint security and support service. The data suggests that various hardware, wireless capabilities and firewalls are receiving so many requests that systems fail completely. This sort of outage can seriously imperil data security and business continuity.

This situation is similar to online access outages, a representative from Softchoice explained to the Times. Lacking enough hosting time or server space, a web page may become unavailable if it exceeds its bandwidth or experiences an internal failure due to excessive external requests. Similar instances occur when hackers use rootbots to create coordinated access attacks, or when certain sites draw too much attention with a new product or piece of information that causes an influx of traffic a server can't handle.

Ina  separate study, Fierce Markets found that nearly half of all business network servers aren't configured appropriately, which may be adding to the problem of BYOD overload. A similar study by Access Markets International (AMI) found this financial figure is projected to increase as employers struggle to meet mobile demands.

With a yearly expansion rate of 10 percent for the next five years, AMI forecasted an increase in business IT spending of almost 25 percent. Although the Fierce Market study pointed out that more than $7 billion is being spent globally on business network security every year already, since these tools aren't being properly implemented, the issues are sure to persist no matter how much money companies try to dump on the problem. In order to foster better data protection guidelines in offices that support BYOD, employers need to work with IT to understand what areas of security are lacking and what solutions will solve them.