In the current corporate world more and more emphasis is being placed on mobile productivity through the concept of Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) where employees will use their personal devices such as tablets and smartphones increasingly to make use of corporate data.
This appeals to the enterprise of course as it can decrease costs to buy and maintain equipment as most employees will have some kind of smart device available to them already.
Clearly security is crucial as corporate applications may have to coexist with essentially unsecured (at least in a corporate sense) personal applications such as facebook, twitter and other personal and social media. The two approaches to securing corporate data and apps on a personal device are MDM and MAM.
MDM (Mobile DEVICE Management) is a sledgehammer approach and consists in securing the whole device - essentially locking it down and allowing only corporate data and apps.
Oracle's new approach with OMSS is much more refined: MAM is Mobile APPLICATION Management. In this scenario personal, 'unsecured' apps can coexist with a secure container which will allow corporate data and apps to run on the device alongside the personal apps, which will not be affected. Thus employees can retain their access to Twitter, Facebook, personal photographs and media while working on secure corporate apps alongside. This is a win-win situation, with both companies and employees benefitting.
Oracle's mobile solution includes a 'secure mobile workspace' which includes a set of basic productivity apps out of the box including secure internet browser, secure mail client, secure file access. Secure apps can be created and made available through a corporate catalogue - much like an appstore - where access and visibility of downloadable corporate apps can be controlled by security policies. The technology makes use of existing corporate authentication and authorisation capabilities and includes an SSL ‘tunnel’ between the corporate container on the device and the server in the cloud.
Rather than wipe entire devices if they are lost or stolen, or when an employee leaves the company, organizations can use secure containers to selectively delete only corporate applications and data. This enables employees the added flexibility of using personal devices and content, without interference by, or to, enterprise data and applications.
This technology will, I am sure, prove popular with both organisations and employees.
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