According to DeviceLock, its survey of more than 1000 IT professionals found that less than 40% of respondents said yes to the question: `Have you taken any steps to secure your business against the security threat posed by iPhones?'
Analysing the responses by region, researchers found that only 25% of respondents in North America and Western Europe said yes to the question, suggesting this is a 'back burner' security issue, says the end point data leak prevention specialist.
Ashot Oganesyan, DeviceLock's chief technology officer, said that the results suggest that the iPhone threat to data security is being generally underestimated.
"Given the iPhone platform's consumer popularity and robust development community, its launch into the workplace is inevitable", he said, adding that IT managers may be relying on the existing smartphone vendors such as RIM/BlackBerry and Microsoft to have the security situation covered.
Oganesyan says that the fact that Eastern Europe and other developing nations are better prepared on the iPhone security front suggests that IT planners in the emerging markets are – by virtue of economic necessity and downsized expectations – already closer to doing everything they can do with a laptop, but with a smartphone.
They are, he explained, probably "just quicker to recognise the strength of the iPhone as a corporate contender."
"As with previous waves of convenient devices that infiltrated the workplace, from CD-ROMs, to personal printers, to thumb drives, the iPhone offers gains in flexibility and productivity, along with greater risk of disastrous data leaks from corporate endpoint computers", he said.
"History has proven that the best strategy for enterprise IT teams is to set clear policies with regard to new devices and to tool-up to enforce them", he added.
DeviceLock's CTO went on to say that the particular risk with mobile communications devices like the iPhone is that an employee can run a local synchronisation for data transfer, completely bypassing the corporate network and any network-based security solutions.