The senior fellow at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business asserted that “mobile is the platform”, and that the industry needs to face the reality that mobile is neither an extension of traditional computing nor a separate channel. “It’s a completely different interaction model, and it’s one that’s controlled by the user”, Snyder told the audience.
He then cited data from India, which in April became the first large country to have more users accessing the web via mobile devices rather than traditional desktops and laptops. “Mobile is the way we access information”, Snyder said, and he expects the milestone reached in India will soon occur in the US as well.
The Wharton fellow said trends like these are significant because, in today’s environment, enterprises tend not to “design for mobile” from the outset, even though “We are a mobile-first society already.”
“Over one billion people today access corporate networks through mobile devices”, Synder noted, “and we are just at the tip of the iceberg”. The Mobiquity CEO said most sensitive data resides “within the firewalls of corporations” and is now being accessed from an increasing number of mobile endpoints. It’s something, he believes, that is causing major changes in the way enterprises must address security.
“Security is an enabler for these cool innovations we want”, he continued, adding that security will soon be part of the equation for adoption of any new technology. Synder provided three simple criteria for future digital innovations: they must provide a value or benefit to the user, they must be simple to use, and they must be trusted.
Companies must rethink their innovation models, Snyder observed, because converging trends like mobile, social media, and cloud computing have radically changed the landscape. “Security cannot be an afterthought”, he declared, referring to security’s traditional role as an add-on solution. Traditional approaches to security – including anti-virus and blacklisting – will not be effective in a world where we fundamentally interact with technology in a different way than we did just half a decade ago.
“Desktop security models will not work in a mobile environment”, he concluded.