One of the more prominent threats to IT security throughout the past five years has been mobility, as smartphones, tablets, portable computers and the software they run remain common sources of breach and information loss. In healthcare, lost or stolen devices, as well as misuse of those gadgets among employees, can quickly lead to a major breach of corporate IT, and this has happened more times than one could count in the past couple of years alone.
Because medical firms are expected to oblige the statutes under the Health Information Portability and Accountability Act, as well as the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act, one can only hope that leaders are getting on board with stronger mobile security strategies. Unfortunately, it would be hard to say that much ground has been covered thus far in this regard, as the sector remains at the highest risk of breaches and fraud.
More recently, it has become clear that hackers are increasingly targeting these organizations because the data they store - patient records - is far more valuable on the black market than credit card numbers and other traditional subjects of theft. At the same time, insider threats and negligence are still major causes for concern, as they represent a relatively large rate of data theft events in health care and other industries to boot.
Secure cloud services, HIPAA email solutions, employee training and more should be on the priority list for health care decision-makers today, and all of them will relate back to mobile protection as well since smartphones, tablets and portable computers are replacing traditional equipment. A new report indicated just how quickly mobility is gaining in prominence among the American workforce, and how much further it will go through the end of the decade.
Health care leads
International Data Corporation recently estimated that there are 96.2 million mobile workers in the United States today, defined as using smartphones, tablets, portable computers and wearables to complete their tasks. This currently represents a significant portion of the overall workforce, and the forecast put forth by the analysts placed the rate to reach 72.3 percent by 2020, with a 105.4 million population at the end of the study period.
Plenty of factors are drawing organizations into BYOD, which is currently the most popular approach to mobility, including the fact that nearly 70 percent of respondents to an earlier IDC survey saw reductions in operational or capital expenditures following the deployment of these policies. Additionally, the researchers stated that the universe of potential gadgets is only expanding more quickly as time goes on, with near-field communication, the Internet of Things and augmented reality all beginning to play a role.
Perhaps not that surprisingly, the report indicated that the health care sector will have the largest share of the mobile workforce in 2020, as it does today, at least when those operating inside and outside of the office are counted.
"Mobility has become synonymous with productivity both inside and outside the workplace, and the mass adoption of mobile technology in the United States has cultivated an environment where workers expect to leverage mobile technology at work," IDC Research Analyst for Mobile Enterprise Device Solutions Bryan Bassett mused. "This expectation will be supplemented by new solutions specifically intended to manage the challenges associated with the growing needs of the mobile workforce."
Again, healthcare faces the most challenging landscape when it comes to security and compliance for general IT matters, and increased mobile workforce sizes will only compound the issues should leaders not take proactive steps to mitigate threats and lower risk. As has always been the case with IT security, comprehension is key.
Maximizing control
Because the mobile and regular workforce populations are increasingly converged and, subsequently, indistinguishable, health care leaders should be working to develop centralized strategies that govern the entirety of IT in a streamlined and efficient fashion. Vulnerabilities will always be more prominent when the organization has disparate controls and policies in place to govern varying technological and operational frameworks.
Leveraging the same types of solutions and strategies for mobility that are in place to dictate the use of more traditional equipment and tools will create cohesion and clarity that can quickly reduce the number and severity of vulnerabilities. Especially when medical firms are taking a BYOD approach to mobility, which is inherently the least secure given the lack of corporate ownership over devices and the data they store, secure cloud and similar services need to be in place.
Additionally, since employees will be increasingly reliant upon their smartphones, tablets and portable computers to communicate with others, email encryption and HIPAA-oriented tools will need to be properly configured on the devices. With a lot of effort and plenty of foresight, the massive mobile workforce population can be a boon to operational success, rather than simply a hindrance to data security.
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