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Speaking at this year’s InfoSec Europe event in London, IT security veteran John McAfee declared there needs to be a separation between personal and work devices.
While most of the companies we chatted to at the show told us that in the near future there will be no such thing as a ‘workplace’, and personal and work devices will merge even more so than they already are, it seems McAfee believes the exact opposite is needed in order to keep businesses safe.
When asked about tighter employee security restrictions, McAfee told Infosecurity: "It’s going to be very difficult to stop people from using their mobile devices – we’ve become so habituated to their convenience that people will just quit and go somewhere else.
"That won’t happen, but there has to be strict controls and separation between what someone does on their mobile device and what someone does on their corporate computing system.
"I think the world will have two separate issues. You will come to work and have your [personal] pad or mobile device and you can do what you want with that device, but there will be no connection between that device and what you do at work… It may sound like an inconvenience but in fact it is not.
"If you have your work computer and your mobile device, you just shift from your real work to Facebook at lunchtime and there’s no problem. But without that, there will be no hope of security either for the individual or the corporation."
These comments tie in with a lot of concerns amongst the industry about BYOD and remote working. Last month, IT Channel Expert put these trends under the microscope to discover just how important they are to today’s businesses, here’s what we found.
Check back to IT Channel Expert tomorrow to read our analysis on this year’s Infosec and see our interviews with companies at the show that disagreed quite strongly with McAfee’s comments.
