How one hour can critically damage your business

How one hour can critically damage your business

Do your staff understand the full risks involved if they lose their business smart phone or another mobile device that contains company data?

Quite possibly not, according to new research carried out on behalf of Kaspersky Lab. It found that over three-quarters of people working in European small and medium-sized businesses would wait more than an hour before telling the company about the theft or loss of a business-owned device.

An hour doesn't sound long, but if a company smart phone falls into the wrong hands, 60 minutes is time enough to do a whole lot of damage. Racking up call charges to premium rate or international numbers is the least of your worries. Being slow to report a stolen device could see your valuable company data being siphoned off.

Data that's easy to lose

Customer and employee contact details, financial information, confidential emails, access to company Twitter and Facebook accounts ... these days a smart phone is as powerful as a computer, only harder to secure and easier to lose. You need to treat it with the same amount of care.

What's more, the research questioned IT managers too. 29% of them reckoned it would take a whole day for employees to tell them about a lost or stolen device.

Take more care

David Emm, senior security researcher at Kaspersky Lab, has some good advice for companies that want to take better care of their mobile devices.

“The ever-growing abilities of mobile devices make our lives much easier," he confirms. "However, what we don’t always consider is the ease with which such tools can be stolen, leaving a wealth of business critical information in the hands of thieves."

"To a seasoned cybercriminal, it will take only a matter of minutes to bypass the four digit password protection used on most devices, especially smart phones. If your mobile device is lost or stolen, it is critical that the IT department is informed as fast as possible. They can then block access of this device to the corporate network and, in the best case, wipe all of its data.”

Of course, you can't remotely wipe a device unless you've put in place systems to let you do this. If you're a sole trader or run a very small company, it's probably enough to take steps to back up each individual device and install a remote wipe app. Read our advice here.

Larger businesses will want to look into mobile device management (MDM) solutions. MDM software gives you much greater visibility and control of the mobile devices in your business, so you can restrict how they're used, what's stored on them and - crucially - scrub them clean and lock them out of the company network.

• Protecting your smart phone from theft
• Where to start with mobile security
• Yes, you need to secure your smart phone too