Like the Wild West of the 1800s, today’s campuses are becoming lawless places. Employees and visitors roam free armed with multiple devices, user owned and company supplied, and expect to connect to the corporate network, wherever and whenever they want to.

Trust.

Subjective, emotional, personal yet crucial that it exists for inter-personal or business to business transactions to be conducted on an ongoing basis. 

The first curious thing about trust is that in many ways it is not a monetarily expensive thing to establish. It is built on the emotional pillars of integrity, authenticity, and transparency.  Those pillars can and often do take time to establish but once established they provide a strong foundation for that ongoing transactional engagement.

As customers, partners and colleagues return home, dispersing across the globe I reflect on a busy week at Mobile World Congress. This is the biggest event in the global calendar for the mobile industry and one of the highlights for me was Neelie Kroes, Vice President of the European Commission’s Digital Agenda, speaking this week to announce a Mobile Action Plan for Europe. The UK has just completed its 4G spectrum license sale and discussions are already underway about 5G across Europe...

Certainly BYOD is on everybody’s lips and is the most common and probably feared concern today. You can read about it in every single publication and blog, and all vendors – including those not associated with the topic which raises question of credibility – claim to have somehow a solution to let personal-owned devices securely accessing the network.

A few years ago I had dinner with the CEO of a FTSE 100 company. After about five minutes of the usual pleasantries, he suddenly became very animated about the prospect of showing me his latest toy. He reached into his bag, and with a look of sheer delight on his face, he pulled out an iPad.

The conversation that followed involved a great deal of excitement and enthusiasm about how this new device would change the way he does business. After 10 minutes of positively salivating at the prospect of using his iPad for work, he told me that he'd asked his IT director to order 60 immediately for his senior management team, as the firm must be seen to be "leading the market in technology and innovation".

Whilst he was talking, my mind wandered to the conversations that would follow his request within his IT team. I could almost see the head scratching and endless diagram sketches, with all hands on deck trying to understand how to make the requested device fit in with the standard corporate network.

This is a guest blog post. Views expressed in this post are original thoughts posted by Nushin Hernandez, Analyst at Canalys.

The survey results of Juniper Networks’ Trusted Mobility Index have highlighted just how pervasive the Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) trend really is. Looking at the mobile device market – according to Canalys estimates worldwide smart phone shipments grew approximately 63% last year, similarly pads or tablets have seen rapid adoption, up a staggering 274% by the end of 2011. Smart phones and tablets in particular, which have conventionally been viewed as consumer devices, are increasingly making their way into corporate environments and businesses around the world are now faced with the challenge of managing a growing mobile workforce using multiple devices and multiple operating systems with increasing data consumption. These mobile devices can no longer be categorised as simply corporate or consumer. The number of personal-liable devices has grown considerably over the last year. Canalys estimates the number of personal-liable smart phones will grow at a compound annual growth rate of about 43% from 2011 through to 2015.

So today saw the launch of Juniper Networks’ Trusted Mobility Index research and findings. We held an exclusive breakfast meeting with selected journalists to hear the findings of this research in London this morning.

Penny Still introduced the session and set the scene and agenda. She highlighted that the research combined theories and best practices about Trusted Mobility and gave a short summary on how the research was conducted with over 4,000 respondents interviewed in US, UK, Germany, Japan and China.

Today’s speakers at the event included;

• Nushin Hernandez, Analyst, IT Security Analysis and Mobile Security Analysis Services, Canalys
• Paul Gainham, Senior Director, Marketing, EMEA, Juniper Networks
• John Smith, ICT Network Manager, Settle College
• Oliver Crofton, Ethical Hacker, Vigilante Bespoke

There is a mildly humorous saying amongst the acting fraternity that you should never work with children or animals, the inference being that they are likely to do unpredictable things at the most inappropriate times.  In marketing that saying translates to never ask end users opinions on anything because they either tell you things you don’t want to hear or come back with comments you were not expecting.

Not strictly true of course and said a little tongue in cheek but as we looked through the results of the Juniper Networks Trusted Mobility Index report, there were some real surprises.

I am pleased to announce the details of Juniper Networks’ upcoming Twitter Chat.  We will be hosting a Tweet Chat on 9 May at 11am (BST) with Oliver Crofton, Ethical Hacker, Vigilante Bespoke and Paul Gainham, Senior Director Solutions Marketing EMEA, Juniper Networks. The theme of the chat will be mobile device security, threats and how you can secure your device and network.

Anyone can participate, so please do join the chat on 9 May at 11am (BST).  All it takes is to log into Twitter, follow the hashtag #mobilechat between 11am and 12 noon (BST) and join in the conversation by adding a question for Oliver Crofton and or @PaulGainham. Note that the chat will be hosted from @Juniper_UK, with various moderators. If you want to submit your mobile security chat question before the event, then please direct message either @Juniper_UK or @ZoeSands.

I look forward to seeing you on Juniper Networks’ tweet chat - follow #mobilechat.