Cybersecurity in the Age of Mobility : Building a Mobile Infrastructure that Promotes Productivity

By Economist Intelligence Unit

Jump to:

2 of 5 The Benefits of Mobility

Mobility offers many benefits to businesses but the core opportunity is enhanced staff productivity. Employees that are more connected—on the road or at home—are more efficient. In a 2011 report from the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM), 31 out of 33 federal agencies that track telework programs said they believed that enhanced productivity was the greatest benefit of mobility. "Look at the tablet technology," says Mark Olson, CISO at Beth Israel and Harvard Medical School. "A physician can pull up specific results and tests on the iPad to show at the patient's bedside." In addition, he notes, physicians can review information on the go, even walking between buildings, to enhance their productivity.

The ubiquity of mobile devices provides another benefit: it also encourages more people to take care of routine matters immediately, via simpler online apps, rather than waiting for somebody to help them. The US public sector is making the most of this trend by offering more mobile government (m-government) information and services to constituents. Tom Downey, Director of Excise and Licensing of the City of Denver, Colorado, emphasizes that migration to online "e-systems" allows more citizens to "self-serve", freeing trained staff to shift attention to strategic efforts.

Cyber mobility can do more than boost productivity in a quantitative way. It also has the potential to make structural enhancements in productivity. Putting an iPad in a doctor's hands can improve face-to-face encounters with patients, but it can have more dramatic effects when the physician is away on rounds at a different facility. If new results arrive for a patient, a nurse can update the physician, transmit test results, receive instructions based on the physician’s assessment of those tests, and start a new procedure hours before the physician is scheduled to return. In this situation, little of the doctor’s time is saved, but the impact on patient well-being might be enormous. More generally, cyber mobility’s greatest potential is not merely in saving costs, but in yielding greater results in revenues, profit, or other output measures.

Mobility also offers benefits on a more strategic level: it allows companies to extend their business and their brand beyond the bounds of the physical setting of their company. A well-designed mobile app allows a retail company to sell to customers anytime and anywhere—far from its bricks-and-mortar location. For strategic executives, this is the ultimate goal: to be able to scale a good brand experience across town or across a continent. Cyber mobility opens the possibility for brand scaling beyond traditional approaches limited by physical presence.

Given the potential benefits, organizations are increasingly relying on mobility. One-quarter of executives say their organization relies on cyber mobility to an overwhelming extent and another 49 percent say it is of equal importance to productivity as other factors. Eighty percent of executives also say mobile devices will be more important to their work 3 years from now compared with today.

Mobility also allows companies to:

Launch and evaluate projects more quickly and with less overhead
Improve service quality, allowing them to sidestep competition based on price
Improve the length and intensity of customer relationships.

Survey respondents agree about the key benefits of mobility. Flexibility (chosen by 89 percent) and increased productivity (75 percent) are overwhelmingly cited as benefits, while a smaller number also say cost savings (24 percent). These potential benefits have caused more organizations to rely on mobile devices.

One-quarter of executives say their organization relies on cyber mobility to an overwhelming extent and another 49 percent say it is of equal importance to productivity as other factors. Eighty percent of executives also say mobile devices will be more important to their work 3 years from now compared with today.

In your view, what are the biggest benefits associated with cyber mobility? Select up to three.

Healthcare: Meeting opportunities as well as threats

The healthcare industry has great hopes for mobile computing. It is increasingly using mobility to enhance the productivity and flexibility of its operations and to meet demands from patients. Electronic health (e-health) initiatives are the most commonly cited benefit on the horizon. These initiatives typically focus on developing electronic medical records (EMRs), which allow employees to evaluate results remotely and communicate information quickly. Telemedicine (tele-health) allows doctors to see their patients virtually and consult them at a distance.

"From a security perspective, we have to look at all of this and see how we can enable it," says Mr Olson about the future of digital healthcare. The industry is at a particular risk from mobility given the sensitive data it handles in the form of patient records. "We are mostly targeted for the information we hold about people and identity theft is our biggest threat," observes Mr Olson. The primary suspects, therefore, are organized crime groups, rather than nation-states or thrill-seeking hackers. Their goal is to get a name and an address they can validate with another source. "The more data they can correlate, the more value it has on the black market," he explains.

To deal with the threat, health organizations are creating a variety of security policies. Survey results lend support to the idea that healthcare is a leader in policy development. 84% of healthcare respondents say they have a policy regarding the use of mobile devices compared to 77% in other industries. According to survey responses, the policies adopted by healthcare organizations also cover important aspects of security to a greater extent, such as privacy (89% vs 71%) and missing or stolen devices (78% vs 64%).

The most pressing problem now, according to Andrew McIntyre, CEO of Medical-Objects Pty based in Australia, is not the lack of policy, but its implementation on the end-user side, as users of technology tend to trust vendors. Even in cases where suppliers clearly understand security matters, they feel little incentive to educate end-users focused on features and functionality outside the security domain. In addition to traditional logins and passwords, Dr McIntyre is promoting enhanced interoperability and better client-side security procedures, such as use of security tokens. "We can encrypt the transfer of data but we are stuck with a password to access it," he says about the challenge to improve standards in the industry. "While the technology exists for client side tokens, virtually nobody uses it."

One way in which to overcome such challenges, according to Mr Olson, is for the security team to push new products to the healthcare professionals, instruct them in their benefits, and demonstrate their use. "By doing that we are out in front of the partnership and we can control expectations and parameters of use," he suggests.

File:

Description:

File uploaded.

1. Introduction: The magnitude of the challenge

Mobility Hazards and their Remedies 3.