Mobile Device Management

What is IT consumerization? How does it affect you? And how is it changing the way IT departments work? We cover all this and more.

There has been a lot of discussion this year about the increasing influx of consumer devices being used for both professional and personal purposes. Many organisations are feeling a little overwhelmed as they try to work out appropriate security levels and device management boundaries. When you take into consideration all the platform and application updates chewing through corporate bandwidth, plus the potential for rogue applications and malware to gain illicit access to company data, there are many headaches for security managers to deal with.

Enterprise software maker SAP plans to ship software in three to six months that separates business data from personal information on a user's smartphone or tablet to improve security, the head of SAP's mobility unit said.

Business customers can now turn over to Verizon the oversight of mobile devices, including employee-owned smartphones and tablets.

Tablets, especially iPads, have become a way of life at the University of California, Irvine Medical Center, which now issues the tablets to incoming medical students and just last month, the hospital's Department of Emergency Medicine said it's giving iPads to all 18 of its resident physicians as part of a patient-care initiative.

MobileIron now supports OS X Mountain Lion, a sign of growing adoption of non-Windows devices

Annual IT costs for managing smartphones will soar by 48% in 2013 compared to 2011, a new survey by Osterman Research shows.

To place management controls on mobile devices such as tablets and smartphones used in business, the enterprise has showed preference for acquiring mobile device management (MDM) software where server and management console components are kept on premises. But that's changing, as companies are now buying cloud-based MDM, according to Gartner.

Adoption of Android tablets and smartphones in large businesses has been "severely limited" because of the complexities of managing the various Android models and versions, market research firm Gartner said in an evaluation of 20 mobile device management software vendors.

Enterasys plans to display at Interop next month an appliance for mobile device management (MDM), spurred by the bring-your-own-device (BYOD) phenomenon at the workplace.

RIM is most known for its iconic BlackBerry smartphones, but one of the driving forces behind the success of RIM—and one of the reasons it’s still as pervasive as it is today—is the BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES) infrastructure. Now, RIM has introduced BlackBerry Mobile Fusion, which extends BES to manage Android and iOS devices as well. While marketed as a value-add for BlackBerry customers, BlackBerry Mobile Fusion may very well be the core product for RIM moving forward.