Vodafone supports 360 different mobile devices for staff

Vodafone employees have a choice of 360 devices to use at work, all of which are supported by the company's IT department, V3.co.uk learned today.

Bryan Littlefair, chief information security officer at Vodafone, claimed that supporting such a large number of devices helps the business to understand its customers better.

"At Vodafone, we have over 360 devices employees can use. The big driver for us is gadget envy," he said. "We have to eat our own dogfood at Vodafone."

Littlefair was speaking during a panel discussion on the growth of consumer technology in the workplace.

He explained that Vodafone is one of the first organisations in the world to get hold of new mobile devices, and is constantly considering new security methods and figuring out ways in which different applications can be used on each device.

"We had to change our mindset from protecting infrastructure to protecting data. The challenges are understanding the unstructured data, and making security as invisible as possible so it is not a corporate cop but a facilitator," said Littlefair.

"One big problem we face with applications is you can download them one day and the code is fine, but then the writer could change the code to being malicious and this code will be automatically updated to the device."

Littlefair added that all Vodafone chief executives carry iPads. "The PC is largely dead at Vodafone," he said.