The jury is in on the bring your own device (BYOD) trend: it’s here to stay. Your employees are going to bring their own devices into the enterprise, and you’ll have to make the best of it. So it’s time to learn a new acronym: enterprise mobility management, or EMM.
If BYOD is about giving employees choice, EMM is about giving IT managers peace of mind. It’s about returning balance between the employees’ desire for openness and management’s desire for security.
Many businesses are no longer budgeting for mobile device purchases, whether directly by the company or purchased by the employer to later be reimbursed. Instead, employees are able to purchase their own personal smartphone, whether it’s an Apple, Android, BlackBerry or Windows handset, and use it for work purposes.
Not long ago this would have been impossible. Corporate IT security policies would not have allowed the mixing of business and personal information on employee-owned devices. The business needed to be in charge of that device in order to have control of the business data, while employees didn’t want to give the company a window into their private affairs.
Now, both employees and employers have come to understand that it’s not about the endpoint; it’s about the information. It’s a shift in perspective made possible thanks to EMM solutions. EMM takes mobile device management, or MDM, to the next level. As the name suggests, MDM is about managing the device. EMM is about managing the data.
The combination of EMM and “containerization” technology allows a wall to be built on the handset between the work and personal worlds. Personal information remains private; control by the IT team is confined to the work world, with data governed by policy, tracked for compliance and remotely deleted — if necessary.
Samsung and BlackBerry have teamed-up to bring a new approach to the world of BYOD and mobile security – BES 12 which integrates BES and Samsung Knox for an even more secure and robust EMM solution.
Samsung’s solution to the security issue related to Android operating systems is Knox, a defence-grade mobile security platform that lets IT build a wall around the corporate data on an employee handset, allowing for the application of corporate management policies.
While BlackBerry is best known for its own smartphone lineup, it’s also a leader in the EMM space with BlackBerry Enterprise Service (BES 12). Device agnostic, it is used by businesses to manage their employee and corporate smartphones, no matter which OS is present. BES 12 gives IT managers a unified view into all the devices under management.
In a recent IT World Canada (ITWC) webinar, executives from BlackBerry and Samsung, as well as Jim Love, CIO and Chief Digital Officer of ITWC, delved into the challenge of securing mobile devices in a modern BYOD environment, and how EMM can allow the best of both worlds — security and control for the IT department, and privacy and choice for employees.
