Solve BYOD issue else Your second wife divorces you!

Solving BYOD Blues...
Bring your girlfriend or personal secretary to home, see how your wife reacts! Exactly this is what the employers feel when you bring your smartphone or tablet (iPad etc.) at office. And this is the very same reason employers bring about BYOD (Bring your own Device) policy. Despite this, still a number of issues linger on constantly worrying employers. Data breaches, data leakages and unauthorized access are a few common concerns.




Zenprise (now owned by Citrix) and AirWatch tries to provide a solution by installing a mobilemanagement application which enforces BYOD policies. It claims to have LDAP integration and also uses Geo-Tracking (location hunting) to restrict your data access when you are in within certain perimeter in your office. There are certain caveats here. The Big One is it increases IT Admin cost. IT Administrators need to install, configure and manage these mobile apps for different platforms. Small enterprises who wants to be lean on infrastructure cost may not opt for it. Certainly you cannot run these software on jailbroken devices.

Recently launched Armor5 caught my attention. What Armor5 claims to solve BYOD issues by adopting a cloud based solution. Users can access company's data through a secure URL. Armor5 uses connects to company's data through VPN  channel and virtualizes the content. There is no need to install any additional software and certainly very low on infrastructure and IT admin costs. Let us see how promising this new concept is.