Great question, Steve. To start, I agree banning smart phones is an unreasonable approach. They are way too valuable a business tool to just ban them.

Since smart phones are essentially mini-computers, they can benefit from many of the same types of security practices and technologies we use on our desktops and laptops. Here’s a few:

• Smart phones can benefit from firewall and anti-virus/malware software. There are already vendors selling mobile security solutions that package smart phone versions of these traditional security controls. That said, smart phones are much more resource constrained than typical computers. You need to be careful how much you run on them at once.

• Mobile Device Management solutions (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_device_management) can help. Some vendors are selling solutions that allow you to manage all of your mobile devices from one centrally managed interface. These solutions install a small agent on the smart phone, which then allows you to do things like restrict what applications a mobile device runs, backup and restore the device, wipe it remotely if it ever gets stolen, etc. One of the biggest dangers posed by smart phones is all the sensitive data we keep on them. Being able to remotely delete that data is a great benefit.

• Mobile VPN clients can secure sensitive communication from you smart phone. We often use our smart phones to connect with our Head Offfice and pass data, usually via email. Depending on your smart phone, these communications aren’t always secured or encrypted. This is where a VPN client can help. For instance, WatchGuard’s IPSec VPN client supports some smart phones. You can even install a version of this client that includes a mobile firewall. With this VPN client, you can encrypt any communication between your smart phone and your head office. In fact, you could even configure your phone to forward ALL its data traffic through the VPN tunnel. This means that all your smart phone’s traffic would go through your HQ’s perimeter security defenses. So if you had a WatchGuard UTM appliance with all the security services, your smart phone would get the same protection as your local users (since you force your traffic through the tunnel).

There are also more basic things you can do. For instance, make sure to set a password (a strong password) on your mobile and configure it to lock the phone after a few minutes. Some smart phones also have an option to wipe their data after too many incorrect login attempts. I recommend you enable this feature if you have it.

Finally, don’t forget to simply practice the same types of safe internet surfing habits you perform today. Avoid unexpected email attachments. If you receive strange SMS or MMS messages that contain links, don’t follow them. Etc…

As the smart phone threats continue to evolve, I think our defenses will too, but for now, the steps above should help.

That's a somewhat difficult question to answer, since there really is no really good industry standard definition of what DLP is (IMHO)... but I'll give you my two cents.

As you know, DLP stands for either Data Loss Prevention, or Data Leakage Prevention. Those two terms sound similar, but have slightly different meanings.

In general, Data Loss Prevention is the practice identifying and tracking your sensitive data; making sure that only those that are authorized to handle that data can access it; and making sure your sensitive data doesn't leak outside those authorized users.

Nowadays, however, many different vendors use the term DLP to describe various technical solutions that try to provide difference aspects of the practices I mentioned above. The problem, there are many different aspects of DLP, including:

* finding your sensitive data
* controling who has authorization to handle it
* auditing when ppl audit or change it
* tracking the data at rest, in use, and in motion.
* etc...

I've personally never met a DLP solution that does all of that on its own, so whenever someone says they have a DLP solution, its sometimes hard to understand what that really is.

However, the second term I mentioned -- Data Leakage Protection -- tends to have a more specific definition, so its easier to understand. Data Leakage Protection is monitoring and preventing sensitive data from leaving your perimeter. In this case, DLP solutions a only worried about your data passing some sort of perimeter gateway devices, usually via email, web 2.0 applications (like html email), and IM. So Data Leakage Protection is primarily about data in motion.

I do thing the definition of DLP, and the many different technological controls that are starting to come out to help use keep track of our data, will evolve quickly in the coming years. Since some many bad guys are clearly stealing our data, we will spend more time protecting it directly, rather than just protecting the "containers" that hold our data.