Mobile security, how important is it to you?

I attended this press briefing by Juniper Networks yesterday where they talked about their Junos Pulse Mobile Security Suite. It’s not an app solution for your mobile security but more of something that our local carrier can integrate into their service.

The question is, how important is mobile security to us Filipinos? Even with the emergence and popularity of smartphones these days, there’s not much buzz yet about virus infecting handsets so there’s little to no demand for a mobile antivirus.

However, with the Junos Pulse Mobile Security Suite, other security features aside from antivirus are available and some I think will be really important for a lot of people.

• Remote backup and restore allows you to backup your phone’s content and restore it to a completely different phone. You can also wipe your device remotely which is pretty helpful if you have sensitive information on your lost phone.
• Device locator. Most phones today have built-in GPS and with this service, you can still locate your phone when you lost it or have it stolen.
• Parental Controls. You can monitor and control your kid’s mobile phone activities, call logs, SMS messages, etc. It might freak your kid out but some parents are just that paranoid.
• Anti-spam can screen and block unwanted solicitation messages.

Personally, the most useful service for a smartphone consumer like me would be a way to control the device remotely. By wiping my stolen phone remotely, I don’t need to change all account passwords that were stored in my device.

Check out some stats regarding mobile threats to consumers:

With business phones also being used as a personal device, companies should also consider having security measures for mobile devices they that roll out. Junos Pulse is also available for enterprise having their own mobile solution.

Unfortunately, this type of solution is not yet offered here in our country. Talks between Juniper and our telcos are still on its infancy stage. But if our local carriers would be including this as add-on to their services, would you be willing to pay additional for some of the features?

Related posts:

1. Open Source Security
2. Norton released AntiVirus and Internet Security 2011
3. Cherry Mobile Trident, the first triple-sim phone in the market
4. Gmail for your Mobile Phone
5. Microsoft’s My Phone service allows you to back up your mobile data