“iPhone. Whether enterprises are prepared or not, it has arrived,” Brian Prince reports for eWeek.
“It is only natural that IT organizations shiver at the thought of the iPhone endangering their networks, but they will have few options to block its entrance to the enterprise and no recourse but to prepare for it, said Andrew Jaquith, an analyst at Yankee Group,” Prince reports. “‘Regardless of the bloviating prognostications of analysts, journalists or other talking heads—this one included—early-adopter employees and status-seeking managers will smuggle the iPhone…into enterprises of all sizes,’ he said.”
“‘Because of the iPhone’s enterprise suitability—not in spite of it—these employees will place increasing pressure on IT groups to support e-mail, calendaring and intranet application interfaces that work with the iPhone.’ Enterprises can choose to support the iPhone by using open standards for e-mail access, and by configuring their VPN to work with the iPhone’s VPN client, Jaquith said,” Prince reports. “‘Not supporting the iPhone is an option too, but frankly in my view the security issues are not that significant,’ he said.”
Prince reports, “Jaquith said that many of the security worries raised by critics of the iPhone have been exaggerated. ‘Let’s look at the facts. Internet-capable phones have much smaller attack surfaces than desktops,’ he said. ‘Moreover, the iPhone has a much smaller attack surface than the smart phone operating systems it has been often compared with, such as Windows Mobile. The iPhone has no open TCP/IP ports, no removable media, no USB drive functions, no Bluetooth services other than audio, no file system access and no supported native third-party APIs or SDK. If you can’t run third-party code on it, you can’t run hostile code on it either.’”
Full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader "Essence" for the heads up.]
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