An ex-colleague recently alerted me to an article about mobile and cloud computing. Of course from a content management perspective there are lots of great reasons why mobile and cloud go well together. Being able to access the latest up to date content on your Smartphone or Tablet and share information with dispersed colleagues is undoubtedly useful. The other benefit is security which reminded me of my own wakeup call related to mobile content.
This post was originally posted on extended-content.com
I recently found a phone lying in the grass in a local park. The phone was locked and didn’t have an “If found…” message so I couldn’t locate the owner. In the end I took the sim out, put it in my own phone and found a number for one of the owners relatives and arranged for it to be picked up.
It got me thinking about what would happen if my own phone was lost or stolen. Like a lot of people I’ve got used to having access to documents while on the move. I therefore store files on my phone and sync them to my hard drive for backups. There’s nothing particularly sensitive but if someone took out the sd card they could easily access all of it.
Enter the cloud. Since this happened I’ve started moving all my information onto cloud services. I use Dropbox for documents, Evernote for notes and Google for tasks. I can access information wherever I am sometimes using a password-protected cached version and best of all if I ever lost my phone I can quickly change the passwords and prevent access.
Of course there are enterprise solutions to help with this, Oracle Information Rights Management (IRM) product allows organisations to secure files and requires periodic re-authorization in order to access them. It’s incredibly powerful software but as far as I’m aware it’s never really achieved the success it promised but maybe with Mobile and Cloud it will finally have its day. Watch this space…