They should, but they often don't.

Why should mobile devices be any different? As mobile devices become more powerful we are seeing an increase in how mobile devices are being used to automate and streamline business. Be it a mobile phone, handheld scanner, laptop, or even a specialty device like a cash register or banking terminal, relying on the end user to secure the device and keep it safe from malicious programs and prying eyes is a recipe for disaster.

Unauthorized access
IT departments are enabling push email to the company's mobile devices. This allows employees to get their corporate emails anywhere and at anytime a-- therefore empowering employees to respond to issues before they get out of hand.

Here's a scenario. What happens when an employee walks into the neighborhood electronics store to shop for a new device and enters their company's email settings into two or three devices to compare the built-in email applications on the devices? Those devices now have a connection to the enterprise mail server but are not covered by any management tool and have no security configured.

One solution is a mobile device management tool that allows you to push SSL certificates to authorized devices before the device can be configured to connect to the enterprise mail server. This would help prevent the unauthorized access. It would also help save the labor and time resources due to the automatic configuration, instead of taking time with each user to configure settings individually.

Securing data on the device and on removable storage
The prevalence of large capacity removable memory cards has changed the type and amount of data people are willing to carry on their devices. A basic wipe policy is no longer adequate protection against the risk of lost or stolen data -- especially when the delivery of the wipe is not assured.

Ensuring that corporate data is protected at all times is something the end user may not be concerned about or have any control over. Leaving the setup and configuration of device side security and file encryption to the end user of the device would spell certain doom if the mobile device was ever lost.

When selecting a tool to manage your devices, you need to make sure that it supports encryption of the mobile device's onboard storage memory and not just the storage card. Expecting the end user to only save documents to the storage card is unrealistic.