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As well-mannered and well-intentioned as she may be, Apples Siri is not welcome at IBMat least not on the companys networks.
According to an MIT Technology Review report, IBM has banned the use of Apples Siri digital assistant on its networks because of security and privacy concerns.
The company worries that the spoken queries might be stored somewhere, IBM CIO Jeanette Horan told MIT Technology Review.
And, indeed, Wired Enterprise explained:
“It turns out that Horan is right to worry. In fact, Apples iPhone Software License Agreement spells this out: When you use Siri or Dictation, the things you say will be recorded and sent to Apple in order to convert what you say into text, Apple says. Siri collects a bunch of other informationnames of people from your address book and other unspecified user data, all to help Siri do a better job.“
More and more enterprises are moving to adopt bring-your-own-device (BYOD) strategies, which tend to enhance employee productivity and job satisfaction as employees can use their own devices to get work done. Yet BYOD is fraught with challenges such as that posed by Siri.
Not only is security a concern, but as much as BYOD can promote productivity, it also can possibly draw from it if employees want to access media or play their Angry Birds or Words With Friends during working hours.
Of course, like Siri at IBM, many types of media, apps and games are suppressed or banned on company networks under BYOD policies and acceptable-use agreements. These agreements tend to include clauses in which employees have to agree to allow the company to remotely wipe or delete data on their devices in the event it is lost or stolen.
Enterprises employ various methods of controlling or managing how employees use their personal devices on the companies systems. For instance, many use geo-fencing, which is the practice of limiting mobile employees access to certain apps and data when they are within the companys premises. And when they leave the premises, depending on their role, they may no longer have access to sensitive company informationso their neighbor on the train home cant peer over and see sales figures, revenue forecasts or whatnot.
In addition to banning Apples Siri, IBM also disallows the use of public file-transfer services such as Dropbox, Horan said.
Companies have to monitor and control devices in the corporate enterpriseboth those provided by the company as well as personal devices brought in by employees under a BYOD program.
Speaking on a panel at IBMs Impact 2012 conference in Las Vegas on May 1, Bob Sutor, vice president of the IBM Mobile Platform, said: People lose mobile devices far more often than you think. So IBM employs a policy of being able to remotely wipe devices. But we try to differentiate and say these are the general security infrastructure items we have to include. And for people who do want to leave something on the phone, we did encryption.
Dale Potter, CIO at The Ottawa Hospital in Ottawa, Canada, said the hospital is so aggressive with mobile and BYOD that he gets calls from the Information and Privacy Commissioner of Ontario about keeping sensitive data secure.
Potter said the hospital gives iPads to a growing number of its staff, mostly physicians, but others as well. The hospital also provides iPhones to some staff and allows workers to use their own iPads and iPhones on the hospital network in a BYOD environment.
What I like about the iOS devices is they have hardware encryption, Potter said. We also have Android devices and other mobile devices in our supply and thats more of a worry. Theres potentially more of a problem with Android because of its software encryption.
Potter added that the move to more mobile devices has meant a decrease in PCs at the hospital. The world is changing; my PC requests have dropped 50 percent, he said. Were ripping out PCs because everybodys carrying an iPad. The hospital has 3,000 iPads, he noted.
IBMs Sutor said demand for BYOD is growing at IBM. Of course, IBM has its own corporate rules, he said. IBM has 440,000 employees. Of those, 120,000 access the network via mobile devicesand 80,000 come from employee-owned smartphones and tablets.
So the move to empower employees with smart mobile devices that enable them to work remotely and access key systems from wherever they may be is clearly growing. For most, it is a function of enhancing productivity. But for Potter and his environment, it could be an issue of life and death.
If I tried to remove the mobile devices out of our environment, not only would it be life-threatening for me, it would have safety issues for our patients, he said.