BYOD IN FOCUS Managing mobile users
indicated that 88 per cent of senior executives now use their own devices on corporate networks, and 60 per cent of enterprise CTOs are looking at ways to accommodate personal tablets, phones and other pieces of consumer hardware as a way of bringing down costs and increasing employee satisfaction.
Mobile tickets Ram Appalaraj, Vice President for Marketing at Enterasys, says that already three quarters of all trouble tickets submitted to help desks come from mobile users. If BYOD isn’t handled correctly, that figure will go even higher. “The question is how do you not just allow these devices onto the network,” he commented. “But really embrace them and think about network optimisation, user experience and enabling business value?”
Ram Appalaraj
Enterasys is hoping to tap into the rapidly expanding market for BYOD management with a new appliance and virtualised server that aims to take the sting out of authorising and managing phones, tablets and laptops connected to the corporate network.
T 46 COMMS DEALER MAY 2012
he new system, Mobile Identity and Access Manager (Mobile IAM), is part of Enterasys’ OneFabric
Security architecture. Integrating users’ own devices is one of the fastest growing problems for IT managers. Recent Gartner research
Naturally, Appalaraj thinks that Enterasys has the answer. Mobile IAM works by creating digital ‘fingerprints’ for every device that attaches to a network. It checks for 50 different characteristics to identify what level of access and policy management a device needs, without the need to micro manage every new phone and tablet from the centre. “It’s about the policy a company enforces to enable enterprise mobility,” Appalaraj explained. “It’s about devices, it’s about location, it’s about applications, it’s about users. The class of device matters, what’s being accessed and from where from matters, what kind of other applications are on a device and what credentials does a user have.”
By monitoring all of these things, Appalaraj points out, Mobile IAM is able to apply network policies intelligently, and scan for suspicious new behaviour using heuristics. He calls it ‘zero effort access’. To illustrate the potential of Mobile IAM, Appalaraj cites the example of a university campus which has tens of thousands of students and staff moving on and off the network with a variety of unpredictable and dispersed devices. Historically, access levels would have to be flat
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for all users in a particular category, but Mobile IAM can dynamically change policies, says Appalaraj, depending on factors such as other users and time of day.
“Think of a university that has dons or residents houses on campus,” Appalaraj commented. “Kids have three or five WiFi devices, a laptop, phone, tablet, Kindle, gaming console and so on. If two are gaming and one is watching high definition video it affects everyone who’s using the RF spectrum. So we have customers who are enforcing policy in a granular way, so that those sorts of games consoles only work on wired networks.”
Alongside education, legal and enterprise applications, Appalaraj says that Enterasys is also targeting healthcare markets where physicians are bringing their own iPads and notebooks in to work. In this scenario, geographical awareness plays an important role. Patient records, for example, might only be available in certain areas and access blocked while a device is in, say, a cafeteria.
Multiple opportunities Mark Pearce, EMEA Director Channels and Alliances for Enterasys, believes there are multiple opportunities for partners with Mobile IAM. For a start, he claims, it’s cheaper than rival solutions. A single 3,000 device appliance costs £16,000, making the cost per phone just £5. That’s before discounts of up to 40 per cent for partners are applied. Because Mobile IAM can be deployed as a virtual server, Pearce says that many are also investigating offering it as a fully managed cloud service, and there’s a lot of potential for selling professional services around every installation.
“It’s appealing to people who haven’t necessarily included network technologies as part of their offering,” Pearce concluded. “We’ve already recruited one new partner who specialised in storage. This is an opportunity to differentiate yourself from competitors.”
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