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Open Kernel Labs Blog
February 22, 2011
2011 - The Year of Enterprise and Government Mobility: Are You Ready?
Corporate employees, around the world, are increasingly mobile and want to access their favorite smartphones and other wireless devices, such as tablets, for both work and personal use. According to Forrester Research, there are now more than 1 billion mobile workers – approximately one third of the global workforce.
Additionally, military personnel, national security operatives, and federal workers are also swiftly becoming some of the most mobile workers in public service today. Intelligence community members and armed services representatives all depend on specialized and secure communications equipment to perform their jobs and fulfill their missions at the office and in the field.
Such rapid growth puts new and increasing pressures on corporations to accommodate mobility. Some 98% of Aberdeen Research corporate respondents say they do already or will soon support mobile communications by employees. In 2011, enterprise mobility is not a “nice to have,” but a business reality.
For government workers in the past, such secure communications devices emerged from highly proprietary design and acquisition cycles, resulting in systems that were hard to build, expensive to acquire, difficult to maintain, and impossible to upgrade. They also imposed yet another device for personnel to carry in addition to non-secure radios, handsets and computers.
The current crop of smartphones and tablets, including dozens of new ones introduced in 2011 at CES (the Consumer Electronics Show) and MWC (Mobile World Congress), can revolutionize the way people communicate, collaborate, and create. While the benefits have come faster and more easily for individual consumers, the enterprise mobility wave promises to bring the same kind of mobile device-enabled productivity and innovation to the workplace.
However, the increase in mobile device deployments brings an upsurge in mobile security attacks. A study by Juniper Networks revealed that last year there was a 250% jump in the number of threats in the mobile space from malware and viruses. Yet 59% of employees who use their phone for business do so without permission, representing a potential compromise of enterprise security.
Juniper also revealed that over the last year in the US, two million mobile subscribers had either lost or had their phone stolen. As to the workplace threat, Juniper said that one Fortune 15 company discovered that 5% - or 25,000 - of its mobile devices were infected with malware. The cost of even a single mobile data compliance lapse, according to a recent Aberdeen survey, is estimated at the low end at $140 thousand and at the high end at more than $1 million.
This poses some real security issues for corporate and government employees, mobile workers, and IT administrators who also face emerging challenges posed by Cloud Computing, open Android devices, and social collaboration and networking. In fact, concerns over the security of mobile devices remain a key factor restricting enterprise mobility adoption.
Historically these concerns have resulted in devices running the RIM operating system or Microsoft Windows variants as the primary “supported” mobile devices in corporate environments. However, the overwhelming popularity of other devices including the iPhone, iPad and a wide range of Android smartphones has resulted in employees increasingly sneaking their own personal devices into the workplace. Approximately 40% of workers are now using the same phone for both business and personal use (Juniper) and nearly one quarter of mobile employees use an unmanaged device (Forrester).
A number of technical and process-based approaches are commercially available to address requirements for enterprise mobility security. These include native or handset device security, Mobile Device Management (MDM), and endpoint security.
Native security and control options are built into the phone by the device manufacturer and include data encryption, remote wipe of the phone, remote wipe of onboard flash memory, and support for enterprise security policies. MDM solutions are also available from a number of third party suppliers to help IT departments manage the capabilities and configurations of employee mobile devices and limit access to corporate assets to those mobile devices that are in compliance with enterprise policy. Other vendors provide mobile endpoint security such as encryption, as well as anti-virus and malware protection.
However, the current state of enterprise mobility security falls short in several key areas, with significant gaps remaining in overall corporate security solutions.
Many company-imposed restrictions make mobile devices too cumbersome for personal use and employees end up carrying two separate devices, limiting productivity and increasing corporate vulnerability. More importantly, the mobile operating system and even the security software that protects the device may be still vulnerable to myriad exploits, threatening both the integrity of the mobile device and any information that passes through it.
On the government side, devices need to support regular communications and applications for “normal” conversations (personal communications, social networking, etc.) but also support secure exchanges (encrypted voice, text, even video) among similarly equipped devices and/or infrastructure. As I said before, procuring these kinds of devices is an expensive, difficult task.
On February 14th, Open Kernel Labs introduced SecureIT Mobile Enterprise, a mobile virtualization software and services solution that addresses these gaps, and is also the complementary solution to SecureIT Mobile Government released this past October.
By enabling an untrusted (and unrestricted) virtual phone and a trusted (and restricted) virtual phone to coexist on a single physical device in separate secure cells, SecureIT Mobile Enterprise helps reconcile the needs of both the individual and the enterprise. Moreover, by isolating mobile enterprise assets, including MDM agents and endpoint security software, as well as regular data and applications, the solution effectively “protects the protectors.”
Through the integration of COTS components into secure devices by mobile/wireless OEMs, third-party integrators and government contractors, SecureIT Mobile Government enables government workers and security personnel to communicate securely using off-the-shelf mobile devices, OSes, and applications.
Posted by Karry Kleeman on February 22 at 10:40 AM
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About Karry Kleeman:
Karry Kleeman, VP of Worldwide Sales leads a team of direct Sales and Channel Partners, and literally travels the entire globe every 80 days. 100K traveler, try 1000K. He doesn't often blog, but when he does, you'll have to resist the strong urge to thank him. Stay Thirsty.