Top Tablet Tips For Security ProsTop Tablet Tips For Security Pros

[The following is excerpted from "A Security Pro's Guide To Tablet PCs," a new, free report posted this week on Dark Reading's Mobile Security Tech Center.]

Is a tablet computer a small laptop or a big smartphone? The answer to that question has changed, and many enterprises are changing their security strategies to keep up.

Why hasn't tablet security been a major concern until now? Tablets aren't new, but many attempts to bring tablet PCs to market failed because the devices were essentially laptops disguised as tablets. Today's generation of tablet is more like a smartphone than a laptop, a model that brings with it many benefits but also many new security concerns.

"We've known about tablets for a long time, but these are different tablets today," said Tony DeLaGrange, security consultant and co-author of the mobile security policy course set to debut at the SANS Cyber Defense Initiative in December in Washington, D.C.

"These are tablets based on mobile platforms," DeLaGrange said. "They're still in a bit of their infancy. They're going to increase in power, in capabilities, in feature sets. And I think we're also going to see, hopefully, an improvement in the security controls that are either embedded into the devices or are available from third-party providers."

One of the biggest security issues with smartphones, and now tablets, has to do with their size. A tablet is bigger than a smartphone but typically much smaller and lighter than a laptop. Thus, both smartphones and tablets are easily lost or stolen, with theft a particular concern when it comes to tablets due to their current "it" status.

Read the rest of this article on Dark Reading.

Database access controls keep information out of the wrong hands. Limit who sees what to stop leaks--accidental and otherwise. Also in the new, all-digital Dark Reading supplement: Why user provisioning isn't as simple as it sounds. Download the supplement now. (Free registration required.)