Our Charles Brookson, with his 26 years of experience as Head of GSMA Security Group was invited to take part in a panel discussion at Mobile Monday London, which I help to organise.   The topic was “BYOD: A Faustian Pact?” and it was chaired by David Rogers, of Copper Horse (a good friend of Azenby’s).

Joining Charles on the panel were experts from Telefonica, Blackberry and Mubaloo and between them they represented a wide range of views on BYOD, around security, standardisation, usability and functionality.

Charles’ position is clear – “it certainly is a pact with the devil: for all the opportunities of bringing your new, shiny devices come a lot of security risks.”  However, the positive side is also clear (in an ideal world) with cost advantages through increased productivity, flexibility and convenience for staff.

Perhaps the best thing to do is accept that it is happening and try to bring in policies that protect the organisation through employee education – but there are lots of areas that need thinking through:

* How, as an organisation can you make sure that confidential data is not compromised?
* What about the dangers that Bluetooth, the camera and tethering bring?
* Are company policies effective? (think about prohibiting special websites vs configuring firewalls instead)
* The whole basis of the working day is being challenged…is it better to allow employees to work when, where and how the tasks require or switch off the email servers at the end of every working day? What about work/life balance?
* Do people really know the impacts of having certain settings on or off and what the consequences are?  Thus the options of dual SIM, embedded SIM and Soft-Sim solutions are raised – with switchable profiles…

To hear a full recording of what happened, you can listen here at The Fonecast, courtesy of Mark Bridge.

Charles showed me a demo yesterday, where he hovered an NFC device near to his smartphone, which pushed his browser to a webpage – that is how easy it is – imagine that this was a poisoned webpage.  Some of the group gasped when they realised that this could happen to them if they had the setting switched on.  More gasps when he told the audience that Angry Birds on Android reads the last number you have dialled – the information is going to them.  How many people have bluetooth on?  As shown by some of the audience responses – Charles points out that most people are not aware of these sorts of security risks. Are you?