SAN JOSE – Alan Dabbiere said “mobile is death by a thousand cuts” at his keynote Wednesday at MobileCon.

 Serving as chairman of AirWatch, enterprise mobility provider, Dabbiere had plenty more to say about mobile device management (MDM) and enterprise mobility management (EMM). Primarily, it’s that neither is dead and enterprises would be wise to consider the consequences of working around them as solutions. 

“Most of you will never know that your data has been compromised,” he told the crowd, saying that many had been lulled into a false sense of security because there’s never been a big global event.

He noted the big brother reputation that MDM has earned but stressed that it’s about simplicity and that a proper enrollment with clear terms of use is essential for MDM’s success.

Dabbiere said enterprises can stir up more trouble when they have to wipe entire phones because they didn’t secure corporate information in a container with multi-step passwords. He painted a colorful picture for any enterprise not taking mobile security seriously. Referring to a big retailer coughing up tons of credit card info due to an unsecure Wi-Fi network, he said, “Nobody wants to be the TJ Maxx of mobile.”

With that in mind, he broke down EMM into four elements: devices, email management, apps revolution and mobile content management. In regards to content, Dabbiere said it’s about security and about the most current versions getting out there, referring to systems that will allow for synchronized editing.

In closing, he warned against locking corporate phones for fear of locking them out of future wireless device functions that might rely on robust participation in order to be effective, like health and traffic monitoring.

“We plan but we react. The world of mobile is moving too fast to just guess,” Dabbiere said. 

When Wireless Week caught up with Dabbiere after the show, we asked him what he thought was the most underestimated threat to mobile security in the enterprise, mentioning that Good Technology CEO Christy Wyatt had answered “users” when we asked her the same question.

“At the end of the day, you have to expect the user to do unpredictable things,” Dabbiere said. “So part of MDM protects the user from him or herself. You can’t stop malice but boy, you can really stop the user from an awful lot of incidental problems.”