Businesses, government not taking mobile device security seriously.

* While the use of mobile devices for work purposes is expected to grow, a survey of government and private industry personnel indicated that many organizations simply aren't taking security precautions.

On average, one-third of employees use mobile devices exclusively to do their work and this is expected to increase significantly to an average of 47 percent of employees in the next 12 months, indicated a report, "Security in the New Mobile Ecosystem," produced by the Ponemon Institute and sponsored by Raytheon.

Even in light of this anticipated growth, 64 percent of respondents claimed that they do not currently or expect to have sufficient funds to mitigate or curtail mobile device cyber security threats.

Ashok Sanlcar, vice president of cyber strategies for Raytheon Cyber Products, said employers want the increased productivity that mobile computing brings to their enterprises. "It's not that people don't want to make it secure, but it is that they have a paradigm, and making it secure does not fit that paradigm," he said.

Computer security, before mobile computing became ubiquitous, was a one-way street. The information-technology department gave a worker a laptop or desktop computer that they had fully vetted and placed restrictions upon. The employee accepted it, and put little thought into security That was the IT department's problem.

"A typical worker asks: 'How am I best going to get my work done?' They don't necessarily look at, 'How am I going to make the data more secure?' That has never been an employee's primary concern," Sankar said.

Today, whether the mobile device is a personal one being used for work, or issued by...