Our public sector organisation (in UK) has recently changed it's policy so that all handsets lock after 1 minute of inactivity. We have hundreds of blackberry users.
As you can imagine, 1 minute timeout is driving everyone bananas but our management seem to think this is acceptable.
I was wondering if there was an industry/UK standard or recommended minimum timeout value as 1 minute seems to be overkill. I know that, at the end of the day, they can choose to set it to any value they want, but if I can at least gather some evidence to prove that 1 minute is too low, it might help our cause to get it increased!
So is anyone aware of any receommended standards of security timeouts and what settings have your companies imposed?
I experimented with a one minute timeout on my personal BlackBerry. It gives peace of mind, and it's not so bad if content protection (encryption) isn't enabled. But with content protection enabled, certain things can happen when the device locks. For example, let's say you're making a reply here on CB, and you set your phone down for a few minutes. When you unlock your phone, your browser will have cleared itself, and it will reopen the default way that you have set it to open. If content protection is not enabled, it will all still be there as you left it.
I have noticed a marked decrease in performance of the Blackberry since the security policy was changed to 1 minute timeout (i.e. things take longer to open/close, web pages stall mid download etc). Do you think there is a link?
I definitely noticed some lagging performance when I was using a one minute security timeout AND content protection was enabled. When I disabled content protection, performance was zippy, peppy, with the one minute security timeout. More than likely, your company has content protection enabled.
According to the settings I can see on the handset, content protection is disabled. So I was just wondering if maybe the handset did some sort of scan every time it locked/unlocked or if there is generally more going on in the background.
Sometimes when loading a web page, it will just hang on a blank screen with the egg timer thing going and the security timeout will kick in. When I put the password in to unlock it, the screen is displaying the fully loaded page that was previously hung! It has only started doing this since the settings were changed - but then its not all websites, just some.
I've tried getting as many people as possible in work to complain about the 1 minute timeout to see if we can get it changed but I wont hold my breath! I'm actually considering ditching the company Blackberry and getting myself an iphone. It will cost me more money but it'll be worth it. And I'll be less productive at work - but that's their fault!
