Companies today have many challenges, with a top challenge being their capacity to secure their employees’ mobile devices. Companies across all industries are increasingly allowing their employees to use their own devices for work, which is commonly referred to as a bring your own device, or BYOD, policy. It is wonderful for these companies to have these policies to avoid having to pay for the devices themselves and to give their employees flexibility to work in more ways than on their computers, but often security is compromised. This is the point where the right mobile device management, or MDM, system has to be instituted.
MDM helps reduce the security risks that are posed by employees using iPhones, iPads and other enterprise devices for work purposes. Basically, it does this by controlling how devices are configured and managing the data on those devices to both monitor it and protect it. MDM comes in the form of iPhone security and patch management, with iPhone management coming in somewhat more frequently since so many workers today use iPhones and iPads for personal use and for work too. There are 65 million Americans owning smartphones today and 19.5 media tablets in use as of 2010, and a large majority of those users are walking around the office with iPhones. Patch management software is a great function and can be wrapped into a formal iPhone management program as well.
With an iPhone management program, a company could both protect its employees’ data and its own proprietary data with the click of a button. More importantly, this function can be performed remotely by an IT manager or anyone else within a company who has authority over such tasks and information. Corporations can use an iPhone management too to have extra tools and functions, like erasing data when phones are reported lost or stolen and gathering vital inventory information, resetting passwords when necessary, and managing installed applications.
A lot of today’s iPhone management programs are taking a hint from other devices like BlackBerry phones, which have been on the market for quite a while and which have specific encryption systems that are based on several factors. Instead of a hacker breaking through a user’s BlackBerry device by knowing the user’s PIN number, the hacker would have to know a heck of a lot more, and so not many BlackBerry devices are broken into. Today’s iPhone management protocols are ripping a page out of the BlackBerry book and are using stronger encryption to protect companies’ vital data.
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