MobileIron Introduces Content Security Service for Personal Cloud Security

MobileIron, a provider of enterprise mobility management software, first announced its mission to secure the personal cloud back in October 2014. It said it wanted to allow enterprise employees to securely share business documents in the personal cloud. Phase 1 of the project created the CloudDocs@Work service that provided a secure portal for employees to access popular cloud-based repositories such as Box, Dropbox, and Microsoft Office 365.

Recently, MobileIron announced the introduction of its new Content Security Service (CSS), which will complete Phase 2 of the project. Phase 2 concerns file-level security, so with CSS, enterprises will have the ability to separate security control from data storage methods. This will be possible through the use of document security rather than storage security. R. Keeton, who represents the law firm of Thompson & Knight LLP, commented in MobileIron's announcement about the nature of document security and the value it can create for organizations such as his.

“Corporate document security, by effective use of encryption and DLP policies, are high value governors for creating and maintaining content security. It makes for good corporate sense, in more ways than one, to protect data against infiltration and unwanted exposure,” Keeton said. “Flexibility is key to creating a pliable content security infrastructure that is capable of adapting to the rapidly changing needs of the organization.”

Ojas Rege, the vice president of strategy at MobileIron, continued by noting the dilemma associated with traditional methods of security. Although enterprises can explicitly tell their employees not to use personal clouds for enterprise documents, employees will often disregard that order because they are familiar with the storage systems they use for their personal data. Even though that personal storage may not be safe for enterprise material, employees nevertheless will use it because it is convenient. Rege said the CSS platform “transforms the personal cloud from an IT nightmare to a powerful tool for employee productivity.”

CSS works by using encryption of documents to which IT can set permissions to prevent unauthorized use. IT can also set expiration dates for files through CSS, and because CSS handles all uploading, downloading, editing, and sharing of corporate documents, it can make sure that files are wiped from any device on which they are located if the expiration date comes to pass. CSS also works with native file sharing features built directly into employees' favorite cloud-based services, and encryption of those shared corporate files will persist through sharing so only authorized parties can decrypt them.

Furthermore, CSS will work with the product of Phase 1 of the MobileIron project, the CloudDocs@Work application that is available on iOS and Android devices, and it will be able to track the activity of any file to determine when it was opened or shared and when specific policies were enforced to limit access to a file.