Whether the economy is doing well or not, business leaders are always looking for the technological edge to bump up productivity and get more out of their workers. But new innovations always introduce new risks. The hallmark of a good C-level executive is the ability to balance the benefit of innovation with solid risk mitigation.

Sadly, most enterprise leaders have been failing to strike that balance to account for the fast-paced evolutions hitting the mobile device market. As more and more workers at every level of the enterprise take advantage of the productivity benefits associated with powerful mobile devices, executives are sticking their heads in the sand when it comes to the growing risks these devices introduce to the IT environment.

I'm guessing that the problem isn't that CIOs or even CEOs aren't aware that these devices can be dangerous, but instead that they've categorized it as a problem that has just been too hard to address. Honestly, most businesses are still too busy wrestling to get their arms around the mess surrounding laptops, desktops, servers and the like to even start worrying about mobile devices.

But I predict that things are really going to come to a head in the next year or so as the adoption of smartphones accelerates at the same time that these phones become equipped with increasingly more applications that can retrieve, manipulate and transmit corporate data. I think organizations are really looking for ways they can impose similar rules on their mobile devices as the ones they can enforce on their other endpoints. The trick until now is figuring out how to do it affordably and efficiently. Many mobile security products have been add-on products that don't sync well with existing endpoint security infrastructure and they've been astronomically priced - as expensive as $135 per device in some cases.

Lumension is hoping to change the game a little bit by introducing a new mobile device agent that works with our infrastructure. Even better, we're pushing it out for free because we really believe this is an issue that our customers need to proactively address before things get out of hand. Our position is that these devices are just another machine on the network that needs to be dealt with, perhaps even more urgently than other machines because of their mobility.