Mobile and Connected Device Security Considerations: A Dilemma for Small and Medium Enterprise Business Mobility?

Business mobility is rapidly becoming an everyday way of doing business. Mobile technologies, such as smartphones and connected devices, are enabling this business evolution. However, they are also creating new security concerns for the enterprise and its employees. Security experts are studying these increased security concerns to develop more secure practices and policies for the next generation mobile technologies. This paper describes these new mobile security concerns and discusses preliminary expert recommendations to reduce an increasing business risk. Although large enterprises have the resources to implement emerging security recommendations, small and medium enterprises (SMEs) may not be able to adopt the new recommendations because they lack IT resources and capabilities. This paper describes the SME dilemma: Embrace the mobility business strategy and adopt and invest in the necessary security technology, or give up their mobility business strategy to protect enterprise and customer data and information. Finally, the paper identifies future research questions concerning SME security awareness and capability to minimize security threats to develop more viable security practices.