New Ways to Handle your Devices
Is your business hesitant to embrace a Bring your own device (BYOD) solution? Is the reason, regarding safety or fear of losing valuable company files? Well, then you should stay with us for a couple of minutes and read the below article.
In recent years a new upcoming trend arose, namely individuals started bringing their own smartphones to work instead of having multiple devices. To have one for your private life and another one for the work environment proved to be highly inefficient.
But you must keep in mind, this BYOD strategy Introduces some downsides as well. Particularly. If the devices are not managed in a safe and structured way, it can lead to a breach of corporate data. This is the worst-case scenario for many businesses nowadays.
Conflict Between Privacy and Security
The obvious solution to this would be to implement strong security policies on your employees. However, this would raise discussion on the privacy concerns. As a result there is a conflict between privacy and security because the work and private material is intermixed on one device.
Not too long ago, due to the growing demand of a safe BYOD solution the concept of Containerization developed. The main two points we will cover below are the following: The meaning behind Containerization and secondly the key advantages of Containerization. Last and finally we are going to look at the advantages relating to enrolling to Android Enterprise.
Containerization
As you can imagine from the word itself, Containerization is the ability to separate your business and your private stuff. Namely “work” and “play”. It strictly establishes a working environment in which the employer establishes what the employee can use and see related to company files. These environments can be called encrypted containers installed on personal devices. This allows for corporates to access your phone within the working environment leaving your personal data untouched. For your business, this means interactions between the employee and corporate data happen in the encrypted environment.
Key Advantages
-
- Encipher — In most cases containers make use of the Advanced encryption standard (AES) to ensure that corporate data can strictly be accessed in the corporate container only.
- Device Managed wipe — This allows for a company to completely wipe the work container remotely. Nevertheless the personal data remains untouched.
- Data flow protection — Through Containerization admins can strictly set security policies to control the data flow from in-outside the container through a mobile device management (MDM) solution. For further information about Mobile Device Management click here.
- Consistent environment — Containers can include must-haves for software such as a specific coding language and other associated libraries. For a developer, this guarantees a stable environment no matter where the software is deployed.All this leads to productivity, meaning less time is spent debugging and diagnosing the differences between the environments.
- Run anywhere — The fascinating aspects of containers is that you can run them anywhere greatly easing deployment and development. Ranging from Linux, Microsoft, IOS to data centres and public clouds.
- Isolation — Containers virtualize OS-level CPU, memory, storage, and network resources, providing developers logically isolated from other applications with a sandboxed view of the OS. As you can see on figure No. 1.
Massive improvements
Looking at the first version of Containerization, it was extremely limited to what admins could offer to their employees. Nowadays, there is a Greater availability of apps that can be used in a device managed environment.
Mobile Device Managed solutions are compatible with Containerization –keeping IT focused on the containerised apps rather than having to focus on the device as a whole. Through the use of the MDM technology combined with Containerization it gives a business the opportunity to use not only, strong authentication and encryption. You can also wipe lost or compromised devices selectively. Again, in such event the personal data remains untouched. Applications like the Kerberos Single Sign-On client Hypergate leverage Containerization in order to offer additional security. Only Applications inside the container can request information from the Hypergate, all other apps cannot even see it installed.
Containerization with Android Enterprise
Android Enterprise is Google’s solution which enables your business to have your own mobile strategy. This program allows APIs as well as other tools to integrate Android support for their enterprise mobility management solutions (also known as EMM). As Android is open source it offers flexibility when deciding on how to apply it to your business. Android Enterprise containers respectively to regular containers, support Google Play Store apps. Google’s entire catalogue of high-end business apps which are accessible through Android Enterprise.
Keep in Mind
As mentioned before security is an important issue by having a mobile strategy. When you are switching to Android Enterprise – please keep in mind; Kerberos the authentication standard and Single-Sign-On implementations across all platforms, will not be supported by Android Enterprise.
To enable Kerberos SSO on AE you will face infrastructural changes, which cost a lot of time. So far there are just two solution which will reduce the time from months down to days: Samsung Knox and Hypergate. Former works only on Samsung Devices – Hypergate is device agnostic.
It is important to note that Android Enterprise is only supported for Android versions 5.0 and above.
Android Enterprise comes in two different deployment types. Namely, profile-based or complete management of devices. As one may decipher from these two terms one is the BYOD solution where the profile’s in the container defines what can be accessed whereas, on the other hand, complete management is having physical corporate smartphones.
In order to distinguish between work-related application and personal application, Google has added the below illustrated blue briefcase icon on top of every relevant application.
As you can see, the use of Containerization has the ability to create a secure, encrypted and easy workspace where employers do not have to be scared of data leakage or breach. Containerization is the new way for your business to have a worry-free approach to the technological transformation.
It can also help to improve your personal work-life balance. By switching off the work mode, all business related apps and notifications will be enabled, so your phone turns into your fully personal device.
Summary:
Containerization can help you to increase productivity, to improves security and it makes your mobile management cost effective!
