The enterprise nightmare scenario
Then there's this scenario. You're at your office Mac, working on a sensitive company document. Now, there's a copy of the document automatically pushed to your iPad, which a family member borrowed and took to Starbucks. There's a copy on your home Macbook, which your teenager is using. Oh, and there's a copy on your iPhone, which you just left in a cab.
ICloud raises serious questions in terms of what Apple plans to do to deliver a secure experience, and what enterprises need to do to protect sensitive corporate data.
"How does this use public key encryption for security?" asked Laczynski. "What is the data retention policy? And there are privacy and service concerns - basically, who has control of my data?"
How to protect smartphones and tablets
He adds, "I don't think Apple is going to come out on day one with a product that's compliant with every regime out there.'' Apple spokeswoman Trudy Miller declined to provide any information about whether any enterprise-friendly security or management features would be part of the Apple rollout.
The lack of information is hurting enterprise-focused developers, as well. "We're in the developer program, and they haven't shared anything with us, either," says Jim Prothe, senior marketing manager, at cloud consulting firm Model Metrics. "Unfortunately, Apple has not been as forthcoming about iCloud security as it has been for previous issues of iOS. I haven't seen any resources made available yet for iOS 5 and iCloud."
One anonymous source close to Apple did offer the following: "There are plans to have some enterprise-level management features at some point in the future." But the source declined to provide any specifics. "Being who they are, I'm sure their cloud service will follow every security standard and even more, it's part of what they do."
Getting proactive
Model Metrics' Prothe recommends that companies review their mobile device policies, and find out how many iOS devices are being used for business purposes.
If the devices are owned by the company, employees can be required to use strong passwords that expire regularly, implement remote wipe for lost devices, and encrypt data stored on the device.
"If it's an enterprise [owned] device, with enterprise deployment, then you can enforce such a policy pretty easily," he says.
Some companies also allow employees to buy their own devices and bring them to work, however.
"If it's a personal device, it's up to IT to limit how much access the device has to network resources," Prothe says.
For example, if employees are allowed to access company documents via iOS-based productivity applications, iCloud's synching could put copies of the documents on the employee's other devices, as well as in the iCloud itself. "If they don't put security controls in place, that could be a problem," he says.
Companies that are under particular constraints are likely to already have security controls in place.
"Banks are not going to let you bring in any old device and hook it into the banking network," says Bart Narter, senior vice president of the banking group at Celent, a research firm.
Instead, banks would issue separate, business-only mobile devices, he says.
Automatic synching and backups also pose another potential problem for enterprises - a spike in usage of the corporate wireless networks.
"The iPhones and iPads automatically downloading music and videos can clog up bandwidth," says Winston Damarillo, CEO of Morphlabs, which help companies deploy cloud-based applications.