It looks like we've finally released the version of SecureMail for iOS and Android that people have been asking for for quite a while. (Unfortunately, BlackBerry users like me will have to wait until next month to get theirs. Bummer.)
And while I wasn't actually involved in the development of these products, I did help with testing them and was quite impressed with how easy they were to use and how slick they looked. Even when you allow for the obvious generalization of Sturgeon's law to iOS and Android apps ("Nintey percent of apps are crud because 90 percent of everything is crud."), the versions of SecureMail for the mobile platforms still look fairly good, and I'm sure that that took more time and effort that I can easily appreciate.
So now it's even less risky to let your employees use their own mobile devices on your corporate network, and that's definitely a good thing.
At the standards meeting that I'm currently in, we just had a discussion about data-centric security and how it should be reflected in evolving standards, and the consensus was that mobile devices are one of the big drivers for moving to a data-centric model of security, so the fact that it's getting easier to address that particular problem is encouraging. (The other areas that people agreed were also going to be drivers for data-centric security are cloud computing and offshoring. If I can read my almost-illegible hand-written notes that I took on the discussion of these I'll write them up as future posts here.)
And besides filling the obvious need for an easy-to-use way to encrypt sensitive data on mobile devices, there are also other benefits to using Voltage SecureMail Mobile Edition. here's a list of some of its features:
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Native device and app integration: Works with the existing email client apps, native UI, contacts and global address lists. Full attachment support with native viewers streamlines access to secure content for mobile users. Sending secure email is just a tap away and there is no need for a third-party mobile inbox or service, or confusing message delivery methods.
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Immediate value: Mobile Edition-enabled enterprises can unlock the full set of rich capabilities, including mobile-specific policies, native app features, and an intuitive native user interface.
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App-store provisioning: Employees, partners, and customers can self-provision the app and register their email address within minutes, streamlining secure business interactions to supported mobile users anywhere, anytime.
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Unified policies and enforcement: Enables central control and audit for enforcing security policies including authentication, recipient rules, reply, forward, and compose - inside and outside the enterprise.
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Global enterprise scale: With no per-device key pairs or certificates to manage, or custom configuration files to distribute, Voltage SecureMail Mobile Edition can be deployed across a dispersed enterprise user population quickly and with minimal operational cost.
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Designed for MDM compatibility: Working with Bring Your Own Device-driven Mobile Device Management solutions, the new mobile apps reach past MDM device-level controls to protect email and attachments wherever they go.
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Protect cloud email messages: Supports recipients using popular web-based email services on mobile devices. Users on Gmail and Yahoo Mail, for example, can rest assured their messages remain secure, even if their inbox is compromised.
So if you have an interest in protecting sensitve data on mobile devices, this is something that's worth taking a look at.
And to the BlackBerry team that's still working on shipping their product, stop reading this and get back to work.
(There's actually lots more than support for mobile devices in Voltage's Mobile Plus Initiative. There are also ways to protect sensitive payments data and other things that most people probably don't care about unless they process payments for a living. Some people do, of course, and six of the largest of these operations already use this technology. But that's probably not as exciting to the average person as the release of the support for iOS and Android is.)