Our latest report and accompanying tip sheet is now available: Managing Mobile Devices: Assessing the moving target in B.C.
The report looks at whether government is managing mobile devices – like smartphones and tablets – in a way that maintains the security of sensitive government information. Any loss, theft, or exposure of this information could have serious implications for government and the people of B.C.
We focused our audit on the role of the Office of the Chief Information Officer and a sample of five ministries.
While government has been proactive in many areas, they can do more to secure mobile devices – and by extension, the sensitive information to which the devices access. For example, government does not maintain a central record of mobile devices with access to government information, which is the most critical IT security control. You can't protect what you don't know about!
We also found that appropriate security settings may not always be in place, security measures often clash with convenience for users, and some key security features or settings are left to employees to implement.
In a joint endeavor, the Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner for B.C. also released a report on mobile device management today. Its report looks at mobile devices from a privacy perspective, whereas our report focuses on the security side.
Our two offices also collaborated to produce a set of 15 tips to help all B.C. residents maintain secure mobile devices – from choosing a strong password to how to dispose of old devices securely. We highly recommend you take a look and implement many of the tips.
Watch our short audio/visual summary of this report.
