Symantec Survey Reveals Significant Adoption of Enterprise Mobile Apps, IT Focuses on Balancing Benefits and Risks in Malaysia

KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia – Mar. 21, 2012 – Symantec Corp. (Nasdaq: SYMC) today announced the Malaysia findings of its 2012 State of Mobility Survey, which revealed a global tipping point in mobility adoption. The survey highlighted an uptake in mobile applications across organisations in Malaysia with 67 percent of enterprises at least discussing deploying custom mobile applications and 26 percent currently implementing or have already implemented custom mobile applications.

Despite this adoption, almost half (44 percent) of survey respondents in Malaysia mentioned that mobility is somewhat to extremely challenging and a further 43 percent of survey respondents identified mobile devices as one of their top three IT risks. Yet in the face of these challenges, IT is striking a balance between mobile benefits and risks by transforming its approach to mobility to deliver improved business agility, increased productivity and workforce effectiveness.Insights into Mobile Device Adoption at the workplace: (Left) Alex Ong, Senior Country Manager for Symantec Malaysia and Nigel Tan, Symantec's Principal Consultant for Asia South Region, addressing questions at the Symantec 2012 State of Mobility Survey press briefing held in One World Hotel, Petaling Jaya.

“We are seeing a cultural shift and rapid adoption in mobile devices among organisations in Malaysia – from refusing mobile devices not long ago to actively distributing and developing mobile applications today. This has introduced a new set of challenges and complexities for IT staff,” said Alex Ong, senior country manager of Symantec Malaysia. “In spite of the challenges and complexities, it is encouraging to see organisations in Malaysia taking bold steps in embracing mobile devices in the workplace. Whether large enterprises or small and medium businesses (SMBs), the high adoption of mobile devices at the workplace among local businesses is impressive as it underlines a mature business environment that is keeping pace with global trends and technologies.”

He added, “From a security perspective, it is encouraging to see that a majority of organisations in Malaysia are thinking beyond the simple case of lost or stolen mobile phones, and looking into implementing security measures to keep their corporate information safe.”

Nigel Tan, Symantec’s principal consultant for Asia South Region said, “While organisations in Malaysia are reaping the benefits from the adoption of mobile devices, almost half of Malaysian respondents from our survey are finding it challenging and rating mobile devices as one of the top three IT risks. Many Malaysian organisations are taking the necessary measures to mitigate potential losses. Ensuring adoption of best practices and investments toward a comprehensive security framework can ensure that mobile computing’s benefits far outweigh its challenges.”

The State of Mobility Survey reveals the challenges organisations are grappling with in accommodating the mobility tipping point and also identifies and quantifies mobility-associated risks as perceived by IT decision makers. In this survey, more than 6,000 organisations from 43 countries, including Malaysia, bring to light the change in the usage of mobile devices and mobile applications.

Mobile Devices Now Critical Business Tools

The significant adoption of mobile applications demonstrates remarkable confidence, by organisations, in the ability for mobility to deliver value. This confidence is further supported by a rare alignment between expectations and reality. Generally, the gains expected from new technologies far exceed the reality upon implementation. In the case of mobile computing, however, expectations much more closely matched reality.

For the smartphones and tablets currently in use, the largest gap was in efficiency - 70 percent of those surveyed in Malaysia expected to see increased efficiency, yet 60 percent actually saw efficiency gains after implementing. However, other areas such as employee productivity and employee satisfaction actually exceeded expectations (59 percent in expectation and 65 percent in actual gains after implementing). Furthermore, 58 percent of respondents are now relying on mobile devices for line-of-business applications, another sign that mobility has graduated to mainstream status.

Mobile Initiatives Significantly Impacting IT Resources

As with the adoption of any new technology, mobility is challenging IT organisations. Almost half (44 percent) of respondents in Malaysia mentioned that mobility is somewhat to extremely challenging, while 63 percent noted that reducing the cost and complexity is one of their top business objectives. In Symantec’s view, this increased pain level indicates the transition from small pilots and tactical implementations − where policies are often bypassed and exceptions are made − to enterprise-wide deployments where policy standards across a larger scale introduce greater complexity. This also suggests that many implementations are not yet taking sufficient advantage of their existing enterprise systems and processes, which would alleviate much of the pain and cost that comes with larger scale and resource duplication.

Mobility Risks Impacting Organisations

Mobile adoption is not without risks, and IT organisations recognise this challenge. Approximately 51 percent of respondents from Malaysia indicate maintaining a high level of security is a top business objective for mobility and 43 percent identified mobile devices as one of the top three IT risks, making it the leading risk cited by IT. Concerns are wide-ranging, from lost and stolen devices, data leakage, unauthorised access to corporate resources and the spread of malware infections from mobile devices to the company network. With mobile devices now delivering critical business processes and data, the cost of security incidents can be significant. The average losses due to mobile incidents in the last 12 months, including data loss, damage to the brand, productivity loss, and loss of customer trust was USD$247,000 overall globally and USD$183,000 in Malaysia. Large enterprises and small businesses are largely experiencing the same kinds of loss, but to a very different degree – globally, small businesses averaged USD$126,000 of loss, while enterprises averaged USD$429,000.

Recommendations

Organisations that choose to embrace mobility, without compromising on security, are most likely to improve business processes and achieve productivity gains. To this end, organisations should consider developing a mobile strategy that defines the organisation’s mobile culture and aligns with their security risk tolerance.

The following are some key recommendations to improve the effectiveness of mobile initiatives from Symantec:

Enable broadly: Mobility offers tremendous opportunities for organisations of all sizes. Explore how you can take advantage of mobility and develop a phased approach to build an ecosystem that supports your plan. To get the most from mobile advances, plan for line-of-business mobile applications that have mainstream use. Employees will use mobile devices for business one way or another – make it on your terms.

Think strategically: Build a realistic assessment of the ultimate scale of your mobile business plan and its impact on your infrastructure. Think beyond email. Explore all of the mobile opportunities that can be introduced and understand the risks and threats that need to be mitigated. As you plan, take a cross-functional approach to securing sensitive data no matter where it might end up.

Manage efficiently: Mobile devices are legitimate endpoints that require the same attention given to traditional PCs. Many of the processes, policies, education and technologies that are leveraged for desktops and laptops are also applicable to mobile platforms. So the management of mobile devices should be integrated into the overall IT management framework and administered in the same way – ideally using compatible solutions and unified policies. This creates operational efficiencies and lowers the total cost of ownership.

Enforce Appropriately: As more employees connect their personal devices to the corporate network, organisations need to modify their acceptable usage policies to accommodate both corporate-owned and personally-owned devices. Management and security levers will need to differ based on ownership of the device and the associated controls that the organisation requires. Employees will continue to add devices to the corporate network to make their jobs more efficient and enjoyable so organisations must plan for this legally, operationally and culturally.

Secure comprehensively: Look beyond basic password, wipe and application blocking policies. Focus on the information and where it is viewed, transmitted and stored. Integrating with existing data loss prevention, encryption and authentication policies will ensure consistent corporate and regulatory compliance.

Symantec’s 2012 State of Mobility Survey

Symantec’s 2012 State of Mobility Survey was conducted by Applied Research from August-November 2011. The results are based on 6,275 organisations in 43 countries in North America, EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa), Asia Pacific, Japan and Latin America. In Malaysia, 150 organizations participated in the survey. Among small businesses, we spoke with the person in charge of IT. Among enterprises, we contacted senior IT and C-level professionals. For the purposes of this survey, mobile devices refer to handheld devices such as the Blackberry Smartphone, iPhone, Android, iTouch and other similar devices. Laptops are not included in the
definition of mobile devices.