SBN

Mobile Device Management

Introduction

“Hey Buddy, can you make it so my phone can get work email please?”  “Oh sure, no problem.”  “Thanks.  Also I’ll need my laptop, tablet, smartwatch, A/R goggles, car and refrigerator all set up as well please.  Oh and I’ll need it done before I leave on a work trip in the next 20 minutes.  Ciao!”  When it comes to managing a small number of users on workstations, a single person can usually handle it without a significant amount of assistance, provided the amount of maintenance required isn’t substantial.   However when you take that same number of users and bring in work-owned mobile devices and personal devices that may occasionally have work-related tasks performed on them, that number can balloon up very rapidly.  While Mobile Device Management (MDM) as a concept plays a vital rule in a number of different security aspects, this will be a deep dive into ‘What is it and how does it do what it does?’

What is Mobile Device Management?

Mobile Device Management first really entered the public consciousness with the ‘Bring Your Own Device’ movement.  For a fair amount of time before this, the only devices considered trusted, powerful and effective enough to be used in most organizations environments were Blackberry devices.  Blackberry had already set up a number of connections between their Blackberry Enterprise Server and many other industry standard applications that could then be accessed on the Blackberry devices.  With the mass availability of iOS and Android devices however, these feature sets- email, web browsing, contact sharing and more- became the rule for users as opposed to the exception. 

Once users started wanting to use a single more versatile device instead of multiple separate devices, it became a (Read more...)

*** This is a Security Bloggers Network syndicated blog from Infosec Resources authored by Kurt Ellzey. Read the original post at: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/infosecResources/~3/mbyKhNVNdfA/