"That's the beautiful thing," Whipple said. "If I drop my Treo in the water tomorrow, I can go out and buy another one," and the technology department can rebuild the software on a new one to look just like the old one, including all his personal contacts and calendars. This can be done in minutes over the air.
John Pescatore, a security analyst at Gartner, a market research company, said that forcing all users to synchronize their data to a single server over the air has another benefit over letting them use their office PCs for backing up data: It creates a log of all information moving to and from the devices. Monitoring software can be set up to search through the data exchanges to make sure no confidential data passes to unauthorized devices, he said. Pescatore expects this year to be a turning point for mobile security, in the same way that personal firewalls and antivirus software on PCs gained importance early in the decade because of viruses like "I Love You" and "Melissa."
Of course, security breaches get the most attention when they happen at big companies. But as hardware and software prices have dropped in recent years, small businesses are catching up to larger ones in terms of technology -- and vulnerability.
By the end of the year, smart phones with huge amounts of storage and processing power will represent about half of all cellphones in the US, compared with about 30 percent today, Pescatore said. The proliferation could get people in the habit of sending one another executable files like games, which can carry viruses.
More than that, the success of devices that use Microsoft's mobile operating system will mean a decline in the diversity of software, Pescatore added. Just as Microsoft's domination in PCs made it attractive for programmers to write viruses for Windows, the same could happen to hand-held devices.
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