“A mash-up of services,” is how Siobhan Cusack, sales manager of Trilogy Technologies, put it when describing the task enterprises face in deploying, managing and protecting company mobile devices and data. A necessity at this point, Cusack said all this entails services being “tailored to individual departments” as “no single suite will match even the majority of requirements.”
It is something with which Tara Gale, client solutions field marketing manager with Dell Ireland agreed, telling TechPro, “Mobility solutions being deployed today cover a number of core technology components as there is not really a single fix for an end-to-end mobility solution.”
Device and app management
So what is being deployed? “Mobile device and application management solutions are now fairly commonplace for corporate issued and ‘bring your own’ devices,” said Gale, with the use of encrypted secure virtual private network (VPN) technology “a must for many organisations, from either their mobile device or via a clientless web browser and there is a sharp rise in utilisation of smart two-factor authentication solutions to bolster identity checks.”
Karen O’Connor, general manager for service delivery with Datapac, said that at present there are two main mobility management solutions being utilised by clients. “These are Citrix XenMobile and Sophos Mobile Device Management. Airwatch by VMware is also becoming increasingly popular. Each of the options for mobile device management (MDM) has its own advantages and disadvantages,” she said. “For instance, the Sophos solution comes with integrated antivirus, while the Citrix solution comes with its own sandboxed apps for editing documents and accessing mail.”
Next generation
Chief technology officer with CWSI, Philip Harrison said that at this point “most organisations” have now purchased an MDM or enterprise mobility management (EMM) solution and are moving into “next generation” enterprise mobility solutions. These, he said, include, enterprise file sync and share (EFSS) to “deepen access beyond product information management (PIM),” as well as single-sign-on (SSO) to “improve user experience while enhancing security.”
Also on the agenda for many companies, added Harrison, are enterprise browsing solutions to provide access to internal web portals and mobile data gateway solutions to provide PC-like proxy-based browsing and data control.
Looking into the mechanics of enterprise apps, Cathal McGloin who is now vice president for mobile platforms at Red Hat, having formerly acted as CEO of FeedHenry, talked of a “constantly changing landscape and the trend is towards giving developers the flexibility to use toolkits and toolchains of their choice for frontend or client side app development.”
Native apps
Talking in more detail from a developer’s point of view McGloin said that those creating native apps opt for “native software development kits (SDK) for the particular mobile platform they are creating apps for.” For those creating hybrid applications, they are likely to use Apache Cordova, he added. Organisations, McGloin said, are “gradually” recognising the value of using a platform for their mobile application development and their choice spans mobile application platform, mobile backend-as-a-service (MBaaS); “and/or API management”.
Paul Hogan, chief technology officer of Ward Solutions said he is increasingly seeing organisations that provide cloud based identity and access management (IAM) solutions, “include as a natural add-on” with an MDM solution. Hogan said one example of an organisation in this regard is Okta. “They have the first integrated identity and mobility management solution delivered entirely in the cloud.”
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