Security specialist SecurEnvoy have published their forecast for the next twelve months in technology and they predict that mobile handsets in circulation will match the world’s population by 2013/2014.
Currently, the world’s population has reached seven billion and there are around about 5 billion mobiles in operation worldwide.One billion of these have been connected within the last year, and should they continue to connect at the current rate, then mobile devices could exceed the number of humans by 2014.
The current financial situation in the country has also led SecurEnvoy to predict that more and more people will begin working from home.This is due to the rising cost of office space and state of the economy, which SecurEnvoy believe will only get worse before it gets better. Companies will be looking to reduce their overheads and staff costs, which could result in both embracing working from home.This is based on a study carried out earlier in the year which saw a rise of 82% of people working from home.
Of course, much of this is due to the way that technology is changing. More people are using personal devices for work and organisations have become a lot more ‘virtual’. This is something that is only set to increase as more people connect to their company’s infrastructure remotely. It is also thought that we will see more attacks on organisations, especially government bodies. Whilst the common conception of a cybercriminal is that of a lone hacker sitting at a PC trying out different targets, the reality is that attacks have now become more automated. “It isn’t just that UK government servers have suddenly become more attractive to hackers than a slice of steak in a piranha fish tank, but more the fact that the automation of attacks gives cybercriminals access to far more fire-power than they had access to just a few years ago,” said SecurEnvoy director Steve Watts.
As mobile data traffic also continues to increase, it is thought that this will continue to grow, increasing to a factor of ten-fold by 2016.Of course, this also means that security is something that needs to be addressed here too, if many firms are allowing employees to connect to their infrastructure. The government recently announced they have allocated more funding to national cyber-security and that they will be working with organisations to ensure that data is secure across the board.However, many firms find themselves in the paradoxical position of worrying about security and realising that they are under-protected, whilst still not allocating enough funding to IT departments in order for them to fix the problem. Recent research found that a large percentage of companies also don’t think they could fully recover from a major IT incident, whether that be a cyber attack or hardware failure.However, as rising awareness of the threat to both companies and the country continues to grow, a balance will hopefully be found between budget and security.
