So you've finally taken possession of that new 3rd generation iPad, revelled in the beauty of its "Resolutionary" display and are now wondering how you can securely connect it to your organisation's network.

With small and medium businesses accounting for 44% of all global IT spend in 2012 (Gartner: Agenda for Small and Midsize Business Go-to-Market Strategy, 2012), equal to $900 billion and estimated to surpass $1 trillion in 2014, everybody wants a piece of the SMB market and security vendors are no different. The prevailing logic is that small businesses need almost the same level of protection as larger Enterprises, but made simpler, since they probably don’t have the dedicated IT staff - let alone security specialists – to manage it. This has resulted in most vendors offering stripped down versions of their Enterprise portfolios with fewer options and less horsepower.
But is this really what SBs need?

GUEST BLOG by RICHARD STIENNON
In this guest edition of our blog, security expert and Chief Research Analyst for IT Harvest, Richard Stiennon, offers a sneak preview from his forthcomming book, Cyber Defence: Countering Targeted Attacks

Photo courtesy of John Palmer

Why a "Bring Your Own Device" approach to mobile access security may not be such a bad idea.

When you ask Chief Security Officers for their nightmare scenario, they invariably mention either a network outage or an intrusion. For years, the enemies were known and relatively limited in number, but today we live in one open network, threats are more diverse, and the old “Maginot line” strategy is outdated. Times have changed, haven’t they? Well if you put yourself  in the shoes of an enterprise network security professional, limiting access to internal resources might still be your holy grail. Unfortunately though, you now have more than just the one perimeter to deal with; you are now in charge of dozens, hundreds, maybe thousands of small and mobile networks: your users.