News last week of the Quora data security breach should serve as a wake-up call for all businesses. The widely used question-and-answer website was compromised by a malicious third party, impacting the account information of approximately 100 million users, including names, email addresses and encrypted passwords.

By 2025, IDC research predicts approximately 80 billion devices will be connected to the Internet. While I’m sure this comes as no surprise to anyone involved in enterprise mobility, the growing number of mobile devices, models, platforms and operating system versions is making this job harder to manage and creates ever more complex enterprise mobility management challenges.

In a very short space of time mobile has evolved from being another device for IT to support, to a new way of doing business. One that allows employees to do the same work they can do at their desk, from any location at any time. In the age of flexibility, employees are no longer shackled to their desks, but tethered to their mobile devices.

Australian businesses need to do more to stem data breaches

Overseas, the cost of the data breach at credit-reference agency Equifax is still rising, having already surpassed $439 million. With more costs to come, it’s highly likely this data breach will go down as the biggest in corporate history.

In many organisations, the IT department is tasked with enterprise mobility management even though IT skills are not specifically required to manage a great many mobility tasks. Everything from creating a BYOD policy, to ordering and provisioning devices, to configuring smartphones, replacing lost or stolen devices, and managing data expenses is hardly the remit of computer science professionals.