BYOD: How to keep your data safe on their mobile devices

It is only the "best tool for the job" if you think Blackberry is better than iOS or Android for personal use. Being the best at managing home/work combined into a single phone (if that is even true - it was unquestionable a few years back but now it is open to debate) makes it the best option for your employer, but not for you!

The best solutions for employees who may need to come in to work at 3am to fix a problem server is to live across the street from the office, but while that's a good deal for the employer the employee may see things differently. The convenience of the employer is not relevant to an employee's personal decisions such as where to live or what type of phone to use. It is up to the employer to find a way to make the employee's personal phone work if they don't want to be paying for separate phones/plans for work use (some employees may be willing to compromise on the issue of what type of phone to get if it will allow them to avoid carrying two)

Re: Wonderfull snakeoil

There has never, in human history, been a case of someone being able to read overwritten sectors on a magnetic hard drive. There was a prize for such a few years back - an unclaimed million dollars which, by your reckoning, any one of these data recovery companies could have picked up by doing what they do every day.

Similarly, for flash etc. chips, the same is true. "Magnetic" or "electronic" history does not exist.

Therefore, if you overwrite every sector, or encrypt every sector and overwrite the key, the device's data is gone forever. What the passphrase is to that key is another matter but, again, overwrite the sector that holds the key and it's gone forever.

So, please, stop spreading misinformation. The ability to remote-wipe is critical to the Data Protection Act and myriad other pieces of legislation that require such controls. And you can have high-confidence that, suitably encrypted, any device is impenetrable and - if it ever comes online - remote wipe will pretty much guarantee removal of access to the data on it.

(Data recovery firms work by mechanically replacing parts of the hard drive to get it working again, in a sterile environment. It's a costly and expensive process but it can't work miracles. After that, all they do is repeated reads - usually through specialist write-blocking devices so they don't interfere with data for legal reasons in court cases - until they have as much of the data back as they can get. Then they reconstruct what they can and put it back into the formats you expect. They are nowhere near miracle workers and will often charge you full price and then say, sorry, this is all we could get back. I know of a school that paid £10k to restore their RAID set after they found out their IT guy wasn't backing up and the server failed - it cost that much to read off the data from old, bad-sectored hard drives that had been working fine but merely crashed mid-write. Even with a degraded RAID set to work from, they got back only 80% of their data, the rest was corrupt. Data recovery is about data reconstruction, not miracle-methods to get back data that's been overwritten - and a lot of it can rely on the fact that "deletion" is not "overwriting", in just about every major operating system).