6 of 10 Companies Approve BYOD

More than six out of 10 companies allow or mandate the use of employee-owned mobile devices for work in order to increase productivity, according to a survey published on Tuesday.

While the BYOD (bring your own device) push has been at the forefront of press coverage, the majority of companies still provide at least a subset of devices to employees. One third of companies strictly mandate which devices can be used for work purposes and don’t allow any type of device provided by the employee, according to the survey conducted by the Computing Technology Industry Association (CompTIA), a nonprofit trade group.

The online survey of 502 U.S. IT and business executives was conducted in February. It also found that the most popular option, at 58%, was to have a mix of corporate-owned and employee-owned devices.

For 53% of those surveyed, the top reason for allowing employees to use or select their own devices was to increase productivity while employees are away from the office. Another reason was that employees like to use familiar devices.

Twelve percent of the respondents stated it was simply too difficult to stop employees from using their own devices.

CompTIA’s report said that companies looking to maximize the benefits of a mobile device-enabled workforce must “look beyond simply which devices are used and re-examine business processes and workforce needs.”

Companies should assess the specific needs of workers, rather than just deploying one device over another on a corporate-wide basis, said Seth Robinson, director, technology analysis, at CompTIA.

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MS Surface Pro Headed To Europe

Microsoft’s Surface Pro tablet will be offered for sale Europe in the second quarter priced approximately at $1,170, while a local telco is now reselling the latest editions of its Office 365 hosted productivity suite, the company announced ahead of the Cebit trade show on Monday.

Microsoft Germany’s CEO Christian Illek didn’t give the Surface Pro’s exact price in euros, but the number will be around the same as the U.S. price in dollars, he said in a news conference at the company’s booth on the show floor in Hanover.

While an $1170 price tag appears significantly higher that the Surface Pro’s U.S. price of $899, a 30% mark-up is not unusual for electronics devices in Europe, where prices are typically displayed inclusive of value-added tax at around 20%. U.S. prices typically exclude local sales taxes. When setting international prices, vendors also tend to allow an additional margin in case exchange rates shift unfavorably.

In addition to Germany, Surface Pro will also go on sale in Australia, China, France, Hong Kong, New Zealand and the U.K. in the coming months, Microsoft said.

Illek also announced a new sales channel for two recent editions of Office 365: Deutsche Telekom.

Office 365 Small Business Premium and Office 365 Midsize Business are now on sale through Deutsche Telekom’s Business Marketplace online app store, said the German telecommunications operator’s head of marketing, Michael Hagspihl.

The Small Business Premium edition, with 25GB of storage, shared calendars, Office Web Apps, Office Professional Plus Desktop Version and support from Deutsche Telekom will sell for $14.90 per user per month for up to 25 users.

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30% Of BlackBerry Users Want Out

The BlackBerry smartphone and its maker, Research in Motion, were in serious trouble even before last week’s global service disruption.

More than 30% of BlackBerry users in large companies said in September, a month before the outage, that they were looking to use a different smartphone device in 2012, according to a survey of 243 smartphone users in companies with more than 10,000 workers by Enterprise Management Associates (EMA).

“With last week’s outage, I suspect the 30% number is even higher,” said Steven Brasen, the EMA analyst who conducted the survey. “User satisfaction with BlackBerry is by far the lowest of smartphones. A huge number are dissatisfied.”

Brasen said the survey found that 11% of BlackBerry users in large companies are “completely dissastisfied” with the device, while only 2% of iPhone users and 0% of Android users are completely dissatisfied with their smartphones.

Brasen said the opinions of end users are becoming very important to IT executives.

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Mobile Security Threats Continue To Grow

According to industry analysts, mobile device shipments will exceed a billion devices in 2015 and will rapidly outrun PC shipments. That’s great news for end user convenience, mobility, and work-anywhere productivity. But it also means that enterprises must prepare for the fact that the criminals will target these devices with attack exploits, spyware,
and rogue applications.

And while IBM’s IT security research team, X-Force, predicts a modest 33 software exploits targeting mobile devices in the year ahead, that’s roughly twice the number of such attack code released in the past year.

The group also sees a number of other troubling mobile security trends. First, when software flaws do surface, many mobile phone makers do not rapidly deploy software patches to devices; malicious apps are often distributed through third-party app markets. Another troubling trend is that some mobile malware can collect end user’s personal information for use in phishing attacks.

An example of vulnerabilities that would make such attacks possible are the two recent Android security flaws that were reported to affect popular handsets including the AT&T Samsung Galaxy SII and various HTC devices.

The security find announced by security researcher Trevor Eckhart, called HTClogger (logging tools introduced by handset maker HTC) that could leak email account information, user location, phone numbers, and messaging logs.

Handset maker HTC said, in a statement, that it is working to quickly issue an update to its customers. “HTC is working very diligently to quickly release a security update that will resolve the issue on affected devices. Following a short testing period by our carrier partners, the patch will be sent over-the-air to customers, who will be notified to download and install it. We urge all users to install the update promptly,” the company said.

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