For the CIO, the managing of employees’ new love of devices has complexity at a number of levels. The first is that traditional security methodology has made “the firewall” not simply a pin hole but a superhighway. Also, the complexity of BYOD where the professional consumer brings their own devices makes it impossible to issue a standardization decree.
As Bill Versen, Director of Mobility Solutions for Verizon Enterprise Solutions explains, ”companies have had to cobble together the essential requirements to employ effective enterprise mobility policies and programs.”
Freeing up the BYOD user
Verizon has expanded device management solutions while reducing the cost impact by no longer managing by device but rather by employee entity. In other words, the company is not charged by the device if the user has a desktop, a smartphone, a tablet or a variety of these devices. This solves the problem of supporting the iPhone masses as well as the alpha geek that carries several of each.
In a presentation from Steven Mancuso and Eric Koob it’s pointed out that in the next three years most employees will be using more than three devices to connect to Enterprise.
On Verizon’s website the company makes an excellent point. When Enterprises first enabled mobility, the device was the tether that kept the employee engaged. Now in the BYOD world, if you want the employee to pay attention to things regardless of time or day, you have to adapt to their choice in device. Whatever variety in between is serviced at the same cost.
Verizon’s cloud-based service called “Enterprise Mobility as a Service” has the following components per the press release:
- Secure Workspace, which employs Divide by Enterproid to separate and secure professional data on both corporate-issued and employee-owned devices. The secure workspace can be managed by an IT organization while maintaining user privacy by creating a firewall between business and personal data.
- New Mobile Device Management, which has been extended to smartphones and tablets, so they can be locked, wiped of corporate information and controlled remotely by a central administrator. Previously, this feature was only available on laptop and desktop computers.
- Expanded Wi-Fi Offload Access, which enables Verizon Enterprise Solutions subscribers to connect to more than 500,000 hot spots in 90 countries and places around the world. The service automatically configures connections to provide quick and cost-effective access to corporate resources. In addition, customers can configure and deploy corporate Wi-Fi directories across their devices to make more effective use of corporate mobile data networks when employees are at their own offices or campuses.
Our Friend Andy Zmolek from Enterproid led a panel at the Mobility Tech Conference about the BYOD challenges and made it clear that the Enterprise is looking to regain some order even though they can’t get the employee to a single device strategy anymore. In the discussion at the event it was clear that many companies have been flat-footed in figuring out how to manage devices and often find themselves trying to run a blacklist of apps, which is a thankless task (there will always be the unknown).
Enterproid and other companies virtualize the desktop in a partition on mobile devices that makes a safe harbor on the device regardless of the employee’s activities and apps on the rest of the device.
Global in Scope
If you can’t get them on a single device anymore it’s also likely they are going to be connected by a variety of means. That means a key ingredient to this solution is in the ability to reach a footprint over 33 countries worldwide and not any specific network platform. So the solution is designed to help manage the global experience in very similar ways to the requirements for global M2M connectivity.
However, the BYOD world has enabled the cloud to change provisioning for the Enterprise, so there is no reason to delay to see if this solution is right for you.
Edited by
Stefanie Mosca
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