RIM rolling out software to address personal-liable handset trends
There’s a palpable trend for employees to bring their personal mobile devices to work and use them to tap corporate resources. At one extreme, there are enterprises washing their hands of mobile procurement and support entirely and sanctioning the use of personal-liable devices — with or without corporate visibility into them.
At the other end of the spectrum are organizations sticking to corporate-liable, highly secure and manageable BlackBerries.
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And in the middle are companies learning about the nascent discipline of mobile device management (MDM). MDM promises the best of both worlds, provided users allow their employers some access to their personally owned equipment.
There are reasons that some enterprises are giving up the control and command of corporate mobile devices:
* They can ditch the whole expense of procuring, managing, securing and troubleshooting the quickly changing mobile environment.
* Users, especially younger ones, are picky and vocal about what devices they can and can’t use at work. Their employers are bowing to the pressure.
* There are a couple of emerging options to allow devices access to corporate resources while preventing corporate data from being stored locally on the device. One is desktop virtualization; another is to get rid of native applications and access apps residing in the cloud through a browser.
Amid all the change, enterprise handheld leader Research In Motion (RIM) is going its part to address the personal liability trend. RIM is enhancing BlackBerry to be a “personal-corporate” device — one that segregates certain functions and data that should be kept private but integrates others where useful, such as work and personal calendars, says Tom Goguen, RIM VP of product management.
Its latest BlackBerry 6 mobile operating system, upgrades to BlackBerry 5.0 and upgrades to BlackBerry Enterprise Server software are getting the smarts to determine whether data is coming from a BlackBerry Enterprise Server — a business source — or a less secure Web site or a personal e-mail address, he explains. The data is dealt with accordingly via policy.
And companies are able to wipe corporate data from the device while leaving personal data intact, Goguen adds. These capabilities are rolling out now, he says.
