American Airlines employees sporting iPhones may be disappointed when they bring the slick new gadgets to work. The airline recently updated its list of mobile devices allowed to synch with the company’s IT systems, and the Apple device didn’t make the cut. “We’ll only let certain things connect to our network,” says American Airlines Chief Information Officer Monte Ford. His main concern is ensuring outside electronics don’t undermine the company’s data security.
That preoccupation is widespread among Ford’s peers. IT departments at companies as varied as Qwest Communications International, Bank of America, and BusinessWeek parent The McGraw-Hill Companies aren’t supporting the iPhone. And worries over consumer tech span a raft of technology—from iPods to USB drives, to Google Gmail, even to gaming consoles such as Nintendo’s Wii—wending their way into the workplace.
While many consumer gadgets and software applications can benefit a company—for instance, by helping employees get their jobs done more efficiently—the security implications are legion, says Ken Silva, chief security officer at VeriSign, which specializes in network security software. “When we bolt those things onto corporate networks, we open up holes in the environment.”
Ban the Interlopers?
Drugmaker Pfizer found this out the hard way. An employee’s spouse loaded file-sharing software onto her Pfizer laptop at home, creating a security hole that appears to have compromised the names and Social Security numbers of 17,000 current and former Pfizer employees, according to a letter Pfizer sent to state attorneys general on May 30. Pfizer’s investigation showed that 15,700 of those employees actually had their data accessed and copied.
So why not curb the encroachment by banning outside software and hardware altogether? The fact is, much technology aimed at consumers is more innovative and cheaper than products made for companies and just makes good business sense, says Douglas Neal, a research fellow at Computer Sciences’ Leading Edge Forum Executive Program. Some workers have a difficult time understanding why they’ve got a 100-megabyte limit on their corporate e-mail account when they can get 2.5 gigabytes with Gmail, says Steve Prentice, chief of research at Gartner.
“With few exceptions, people don’t do it because they want to be awkward or break security or be a pain in the backside,” he says of the tendency to use consumer tech at work. “They do it because of frustration, or a problem or limitation with the IT services provided by the organization.”
Airline Goes with Google
In a recent study conducted by the Financial Times newspaper and researchers at the Leading Edge Forum, which brings together researchers and executives to explore IT-related subjects, two-thirds of surveyed U.S. and British FT subscribers said they had equipment at home that was as good as or better than the equipment they had at work.
KLM knows those shortcomings all too well. When the airline wanted to put a search function on its corporate intranet, it spent much time and money testing a costly conventional corporate tool that simply didn’t work well. The answer finally came in the form of the Google Mini search appliance that cost all of €2,995 ($4,128).
