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Taking control of our mobile lives
By Adi Ofrat, United States CEO, CelleBrite
Mobile devices – and the data that resides in them – play an ever-growing role in consumers’ day-to-day lives, having embedded themselves into mass culture in a staggeringly short amount of time. Even the simplest mobile handset has become capable of serving multiple data-driven uses, storing a significant amount of valuable information for the user that makes their life easier and more connected. Many consumers have even given up the traditional land line in favor of using the mobile phone as their mainstay person-to-person communication device, so it may not be a stretch to say that the mobile handset has become, without contest, the user’s most essential connection to the outside world.
Smartphones have taken this trend to a new level. No longer simply content to catalogue users’ contacts or photos, the smartphone has gone beyond this to include such things as housing entire music collections, other media (e.g., favorite movies and television shows) and complete work life (e-mail history, contact databases, personal calendars). You name it, the smartphone can do it. The phone has been completely transformed from being a luxury item to an integral part of its user’s life, and in many ways the ‘go to’ data store of all vital information and assets.
The upside of this is that it has provided an enormous opportunity for companies to provide the applications and data-driven services that play an ever more integral role in consumers’ lives. The downside, as has been seen recently, is that losing this data is a potentially devastating prospect, both for personal and – especially – business users.
The growing data market
Somehow, despite the ongoing recession, the market for applications and services (and, by that rationale, data) continues to grow in as-yet-unrealized ways. The figure of daily mobile Internet usage grew by more than 100% from January 2008 to January 2009, and 2010 figures are expected to continue to grow exponentially.
The consumer appetite for applications and the data that enables them continues to grow faster than companies can develop new ones. Companies are rushing to meet demand by creating their own app storefronts, mirroring successful models (read: Apple) and building upon previous examples to create a more dynamic mobile experience. The Mobile Entertainment Forum, via its Business Conference Index, recently predicted that average worldwide mobile media revenue will grow by 33% in the coming year, an increase of 6% over its prediction early in 2009.
All of this continues to demonstrate that as much as the mobile phone and its data have become an essential part of users’ identities, it can still become even more of an inextricable part of day-to-day life.
Protecting consumer data
Consumers’ growing reliance on mobile data as a part of their lives translates into a significant risk in putting all their proverbial data eggs into one basket. What happens if all this data is inexplicably lost, and hasn’t been backed up sufficiently? How will consumers’ lives be affected by losing so much personal data? And how will losing data affect the companies that rely on smartphones to conduct business daily?
Recent events have brought a sobering realism to this possibility, and prove that additional measures need to be taken to protect consumer data. Though most of the data affected in this event has now been recovered, the occurrence should be seen as a wake-up call to the industry to continue to develop better, more reliable backup solutions for consumer data. Consumers need to be safe in the knowledge that the phones they buy will not be the end-all, be-all storage device for their valuable data. They should also have the freedom to be able to change and upgrade devices without the fear that doing so will result in the loss of the only data they have.
But no matter whether consumers are offered backup services offered at point-of-sale or in a data center, they too shoulder much of the data security responsibility. Consumers need to take the necessary precautions to safeguard their data, whether it means backing it up to a PC or other personal device where it can be retrieved easily in the event of loss. We can only provide the tools to make this possible – it’s the consumers themselves that need to use them.
