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Smartphones and personal digital assistants (PDAs) are among the top growth technologies today, as organizations use mobile devices to provide personnels with the information needed to make informed decisions anytime, anywhere. This mobile business intelligence (BI) raises the value of mobile devices by enabling organizations to use them to deliver accurate, mission-critical performance information that is customized to personnels, where and when they need it.

As the delivery of business intelligence on mobile devices becomes increasingly popular among organizations, five important security guidelines must be considered.

Authentication
Authentication ensures that only users with valid passwords, IDs and related identifiers can access a system. Mobile BI solutions should be security agnostic and must work with an organization's existing security model to define and maintain identifiers, such as user names, IDs, passwords, regional settings, and personal preferences.

Mobile BI solutions should also support multiple user communities, including the ability to assign permission rights to users to ensure that only those with the proper permission have access to specific folders, sub-folders, reports, analyses, scorecards, dashboards, shared group-based portal pages, and other BI capabilities.

Ideally, mobile BI solutions should leverage your existing organizational security structure to secure all BI content, including the content used on mobile devices.

Authorization
Authorization ensures that only certain users, groups, and roles can access specific data or information, and can perform only certain actions on that data or information.

While setting these access permissions, organizations should leverage users and groups defined within their existing authentication providers. As with authentication, the authorization security measures that you establish apply to all of your BI content.

Safeguard Sensitive Data
Most mobile BI solutions come with an encryption mechanism for all data and communications. Only authenticated and authorized sources and users can decrypt the data, converting it back into a meaningful form that can be accessed and understood. Encryption security applies to all BI data communicated between and used on mobile devices.

Mobile device manufacturers are acutely aware of the security issues that users face on their devices and the need to address these issues with security geared specifically for their products.

Passwords: More Complex, the Better
Passwords are used to control who can use and access data on a mobile handheld device. To maximize password protection, it is highly recommended to create a strong password that aligns with password policies of the enterprise. Strong passwords are refreshed every few months and typically mix numbers, upper and lower case letters and alpha numeric characters are used.

'Kill' Lost or Stolen Devices
If a device is reported lost or stolen, an administrator can prevent data stored on the device from being accessed. The administrator sends a remote 'kill' command to the device, erasing all the data on the device-including data in memory-disabling it from further use.

If connections are disabled on a lost or stolen device, there is no way to remotely wipe the data. 'Lease key' technology addresses this challenge by ensuring that data stored on mobile devices remains safe even if a device is offline and cannot be contacted by an administrator.

Lease key technology functions like a hotel key. The key is enabled for the duration or lease of your stay. When you check out, your key is disabled and you are unable to access the room. The room is still there, but you can't gain access until you make appropriate arrangements, or in the case of some mobile BI solutions, until you connect, re-authenticate, and are granted a new lease key. Consequently, BI data is even more secure on mobile devices than email.

V Subramanyam
The author is VP, information management, IBM
Software Group, India/South Asia
vadmail@cybermedia.co.in