Mobile Security: Tips for Using Personal Devices at Work

Businesses in all forms operate under numerous business regulations. Small businesses such as finance healthcare, or one where a fine might be imposed if a data breach occurred need to recognize mobile security as a fundamental layer of yours or your company’s information security process.

Mobiles are smartphones and used for ecommerce for consumers and they are used for business tasks as Point of Sales to process credit cards or make payments.

A hospital is a perfect example: Many nurses have mobile phones and many more have tablets for work related purposes. They must be concerned about Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act also known as *HIPAA: The rule under HIPPA requires health plans, health care providers, and others required by HIPAA to notify individuals (patients) of any breaches of their medical data.

Overall routine patient information is gathered for all hospital patients, such as the patient’s Social Security number, name, address, D.O.B, gender and other data that helps them authenticate the patient’s identity and insurance coverage data.

So if you as an employee of a hospital use your personal device at work and also use it outside of work and it gets lost or stolen, then YES, you and the hospital would be in a great deal of hot water in the event that mobile device was lost.

This is where a BYOD or Bring Your Own Device policy comes into place.  Cozy up to your IT manager and find out what that mobile security policy states. Sometimes they are so restrictive you may not want to use your own device.

Robert Siciliano personal and small business security specialist toADT Small Business Security discussing ADT Pulse on Fox News. Disclosures