Just recently, the Federal Government handed out a gift (how often can you say that?) to the mobile community. As part of the new open digital government initiative, the Federal CIO Council and Department of Homeland Security have published the Mobile Security Reference Architecture. It is a comprehensive picture of the minimal security controls necessary for a particular government department to begin undertaking the support of mobile devices by the agency staff. From a business perspective, it is also important due to the fact that here are comprehensive, best-practice documents vetted by various federal agencies including the Department of Defense. Imagine, you are a technical architect with some mobile experience and your department head stops by and states that the firm wants to support the sales staff with mobile applications and you are assigned the task of coming up with an enterprise-wide mobile security strategy. Instead of panicking (queue the picture of Edvard Munch’s painting “The Scream”) and wondering where to start, this document along with the companion documents; Federal Mobile Security Baseline and the Mobile Security Decision Framework provide the building blocks of a solid mobile security architecture that your IT group can utilize to deploy through the enterprise.
