Should You Ban the iPhone?

When David O’Berry, IT director for the South Carolina Department of Probation, Parole and Pardon Services, was quoted in a Wall Street Journal story titled “Why IT Hates the iPhone,” he was inundated with complaints from Apple fans.

“After that quote, I had to defend myself in multiple blogs. I didn’t say anything about hating the iPhone,” O’Berry said. “Personally, I think the iPhone is a great device. My point was that users need to be cognizant of the dangers posed by certain devices in certain situations.”

O’Berry noted that while Apple has addressed many of the security flaws of the iPhone, a glaring problem remains: lack of encryption on the device. “Until you encrypt that device, it is a walking time bomb from IT’s point of view,” he said.

Unless data is encrypted at the device level, users can copy sensitive information from work, take it home with them, lose the device or have it stolen and expose confidential organizational information to whomever has the device in hand. In other words, without encryption, the iPhone, or any other device like it, can’t be considered enterprise-class.

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