GRC Roll-up: iOS, Android More Secure than PCs; OpenText Gets Social Archive Records Management

By David Roe (@druadh20) Jun 29, 2011

If things are slowing down on the run up to the holiday weekend, it was a busy week in GRC. Symantec research shows iOS and Android to be more secure than PCs, OpenText is offering archiving and records management of social content through Social WorkPlace, Cabinet NG digs deeper into the legal space and Clearwell looks at cloud computing and e-Discovery.

How Secure are iOS, Android?

Holiday weekend on the way and you’ll want to know that your data is safe. Symantec (news, site) has released new research into mobile device security and has come up with some interesting findings.

The research, entitled A Window into Mobile Device Security: Examining the security approaches employed in Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android, took an in-depth, technical evaluation of the two main mobile platforms, Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android, to understand the security risks of each.

Chief among the findings is that, while the most popular mobile platforms were designed with security in mind, these provisions are not always sufficient to protect sensitive enterprise data that regularly finds its way onto devices.

Complicating matters, they are increasingly being connected to and synchronized with an entire ecosystem of third-party cloud- and desktop-based services outside the enterprise.

Some of the principal findings include:

While offering improved security over desktop-based operating systems, both iOS and Android are still vulnerable to many existing categories of attacks.
iOS’s security model offers strong protection against traditional malware, primarily due to Apple’s rigorous app certification process.
Google has opted for a less-rigorous certification model, permitting any software developer to create and release apps anonymously, without inspection. This lack of certification has arguably led to today’s increasing volume of Android-specific malware.

And there’s a lot more besides. Before drawing any conclusions about one or the other, it’s worth taking a look at the report, which can be downloaded here for free.

OpenText Offers Social Content Archiving

OpenText (news, site) took advantage of the recent e2.0 conference to announce the release of the upgraded Social WorkPlace v2.0, which added functionality as well as optional integration with ECM Suite 2010, giving it muscle that most other social media applications can only wish for.

The result is a product that can archive content created during projects in compliance with an organization’s regulations and policies, as well as offering records management control to an enterprise content repository with minimal intervention from technical staff.

Providing out-of-the-box functionality as a SaaS or on-premise deployment, this version has added enhancements to wiki editor, chat and records management and information governance through the ECM Suite. Interested in more?