RESEARCH In Motion (RIM), the maker of BlackBerry, yesterday highlighted the importance of having an IT strategy to prevent company data from being inadvertently leaked into social media via employee devices.
According to RIM, 10% of tablets sold this year would go into enterprises, and that number was set to grow dramatically as tablets became more affordable and viewed as must-have tools, rather than nice-to-have.
Technology research group Gartner expected that 80% of organisations would support a workforce using tablets by 2013, adding that 90% of firms would support corporate applications on personal devices by 2014.
It said that IT organisations were forced to create mobility programmes to support corporate e-mail and other applications on consumer products. And with 70- million customers and 45-million BBM (BlackBerry Messenger) subscribers globally, BlackBerry said it carried more than 20 petabytes of data each month.
Speaking at the BlackBerry Innovation Forum 2011 in Bryanston yesterday, Robyn Milham, enterprise sales lead at Research In Motion SA, called for companies to be alert to the potential of having employees expose company data via their own devices.
Ms Milham said that pressure was being put on IT departments by consumers, or employees in the business, to prepare a mobile strategy for cases where employees lost their own handsets or corporate devices containing sensitive company data.
Gartner defined mobile device management as products and services that enabled organisations to deploy and support corporate applications to mobile devices, such as smartphones and tablets for personal use, enforcing policies and maintaining the desired level of IT control across multiple platforms. – via BusinessDay