Last week’s article provided a summary of best practices for the basic management of smartphones in your organization. Going a step or two beyond the basic management techniques, Fiberlink Communications now provides us with best practices for more advanced management of the ubiquitous mobile devices that have become more computer than phone.
Last week’s article provided a summary of best practices for the basic management of smartphones in your organization. Unless you want to stick your head in the sand and ignore all those iPhones and Droids your co-workers are using anyway, you’ll embrace the smartphones and allow them to access corporate resources in a smart way.
Going a step beyond the basic management techniques, Fiberlink Communications now provides us with best practices for more advanced management of the ubiquitous mobile devices that have become more computer than phone. Fiberlink recommends you consider these advances once you have your management foundation in place.
A brief history of smartphones
1. Enable cost management for network usage. Multi-national businesses should put in place a capability to monitor and limit international data roaming, as those costs can reach thousands of dollars quickly. It’s not unusual for roaming charges to reach $5 a minute or more. Also, with the recent U.S. pricing plans introduced by AT&T for iPhones and iPads, usage tracking and restriction will become a requirement for domestic connectivity.
2. Application restrictions and your own app store. Today, most handset vendors do a good job of limiting applications to certified and approved applications. (Some would argue the vendors do too good of a job restricting access to the phone by developers.) That said, certain organizations or industries may have the need to restrict the type of application allowed on a corporate approved device. Most mobile device management (MDM) solutions provide this functionality. On a more proactive front, businesses can set up their own enterprise app store, including on iPhones, to restrict the set and ease the delivery of applications to your mobile devices. This is not a requirement in 2010, but certainly is an interesting capability to explore after your smartphone management foundation is in place.
3. Provide a backup and recovery service. If you have a user segment that has critical and unique data beyond e-mail, you may want to consider a backup and recovery solution. Now, that’s not very critical for iPhone users, since iTunes has taken care of this for users already. Given that, and BlackBerry’s e-mail centricity, this practice is probably only for very specific use cases.
What happens if you need a security fortress for your smartphones? Very few organizations should find themselves in this situation currently (and for what looks like the foreseeable future). If you think you are, then you are probably involved in highly sensitive and classified information. Here are a few tips for you.
4. Limit data transfer and separate out corporate and personal information. Some businesses find it valuable to restrict downloading attachments or to prevent the copying of data to removable media. Implementing these solutions is very difficult and the data classification exercise is nearly intractable. An alternative is to create separate virtual containers for business and personal data and applications.
5. Install firewall, antivirus, and intrusion-prevention solutions. There are effective applications in the market that apply these PC-like approaches to device security. Home Wi-Fi access does raise some concern that devices are not always protected by carrier networks. But for the time being, mobile devices enjoy the same company as Macintosh and Linux platforms and have the benefit of much less complexity as attack-prone Windows PCs. So, these solutions are primarily targeted to highly sensitive environments where “good enough” just isn’t.
Whether you are building the foundation for smartphone management or you are stepping up to more advanced methods of management and security, you can take advantage of Fiberlink’s series of Webinars about managing mobile devices here.
