“Organizations are surprised to find out how many applications are used by their workers”

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Good Technologies unveiled a security system for mobile devices.

Gartner declared recently that “MDM is dead” – is this really the situation on the market?

Damian Wilk, Regional Sales Manager of Good Technologies: “We are witnessing indeed a change in the talk and policy regarding mobile security. If in the last two years most discussions centered around the issue of securing emails in mobile devices and transition from Blackberry to the new platforms, the talk at present deals with management of information and applications, and not management of the device. MDM (Mobile Device Management) cannot address the new work landscape and the existing cyber threats”.

How do organizations cope with the landscape of work character and existing threats?

“Organizations are not always aware of the real needs of their workers. When I meet with my clients, I ask them – `Do you believe you are having a Consumer Application issue?` For instance, do your workers use applications like dropbox, Viper, EverNote etc. for their daily work? We encourage our clients to perform a survey among their workers and ask them which applications they use. Organizations performing such surveys are surprised to find out how many applications are used by their workers. One of our customers discovered that one of his senior workers has been using for several months an application called iAnotate, enabling him to view PDF files and write down comments. The application was not secured, and this created a situation of the organizational information being exposed to hackers during a long period.

“We live in an era of `There`s an app for that`, era in which the workers choose which applications to use, and the IT departments need to provide a secured  framework for this purpose, so that the workers have tools for doing their work also with their mobile device. This is not `nice to have`, but a real necessity.

Is the MAM approach preferable, from this point of view?

“There are organizations for which the MAM (Mobile Application Management) is sufficient, because their workers are using only one or two applications. But the world of information security has to be looked upon in a more holistic way, and provide the full environment for security. The system approach has to be used, in which there is not only security for applications but also secured integration between the various applications, for instance between email application and documents editing application. The workflow will be secured only if the interface and the ways of interaction between the applications will be secured. “

What makes the solutions of Good Technologies special compared to the competitors on the market?

“Our purpose is not to make a White List or Black List, but to offer a secured organizational platform, including secured interaction between the applications. We work together with the application developers, in the organizations and in leading companies on the market such as Salesforce.com, SAP and Oracle, for creation of secure versions for mobile devices. We provide them the secured container, and guide them how to create a secured version of the application. We offer at present 30 secured applications, including email, documents editing, CRM, ERP, application for forms signing, etc, and we are going to launch 50 more applications in the coming months.

i-HLS Israel Homeland Security