Since 50,000 mobile phones are lost or stolen in the London area during any two-week period, and because the population of London is expected to increase by one-third during the Games, Venafi expects phone losses to increase by a similar proportion – meaning that 67,000 mobile phones will be lost.
Forty percent of these (26,800) are likely to be smartphones. Given the storage capacity of such devices, that means, saie Venafi, that a total of 214.4 terabytes – or the equivalent of 214.4 million books – will likely be lost or otherwise end up in the wrong hands during the Olympic Games. And that’s without factoring in the greater data volumes available on larger devices such as tablets and laptops.
These statistics have been drawn from various sources and different reports. However, Venafi’s particular concern stems from the growing practice of BYOD (bring your own device) in business. Many of the stolen or lost devices at the London Olympics will likely contain commercial information.
“There’s been an explosion of corporate data available to users from their mobile devices,” said Gregory Webb, Venafi's VP of marketing. “This is a real danger and one that is often overlooked. People don’t consider or take action to protect the vast volumes of information they carry and have internet access to.”
It is the increasing tendency for staff to use their personal devices at work, and to carry on working on the same devices at home, that concerns him. “With the ever-shrinking boundaries between work devices and work-enabled personal devices, lost or stolen smartphones and other mobile devices that fall into the wrong hands place companies and business data at tremendous risk.”
Webb recommended that both business and users take adequate precautions, adding encryption and digital certificates to on-device security.