In addition, 96% of lost or stolen mobile devices were successfully recovered or decommissioned by these companies, and 8% reported an increase in speed of decision making in the last 12 months, according to an online survey of over 260 organizations in 45 countries conducted in February and March 2012. The survey results were contained in a report titled Enterprise Mobility Management 2012 prepared by Aberdeen analyst Andrew Borg.
Aberdeen defines “best-in-class” as those companies in the top 20% of aggregate performance scorers. The industry average was defined as companies in the middle 50% of aggregate performance scorers, and laggards were defined as in the bottom 30%.
For companies that fell in the industry average category, only 43% of employees have secure remote mobile access to the corporate network, 90% of lost or stolen mobile devices were successfully recovered or decommissioned, and 5% reported an increase in the speed of decision making in the last 12 months.
For laggard companies, only 39% of employees have secure remote mobile access to the corporate network, 88% of lost or stolen mobile devices were successfully recovered or decommissioned, and 5% reported a decrease in the speed of decision making in the last 12 months.
For companies in the best-in-class category, Aberdeen found that they have several characteristics in common: they establish security and compliance policies for the full lifecycle of all compliant employee-owned mobile devices, track the number of lost or stolen mobile devices successfully decommissioned, and manage and optimize mobile application and network performance.
A new product that could help companies achieve best-in-class status was recently launched by ForeScout Technologies and Fiberlink. The product, called ForeScout MDM powered by MaaS360, provides integrated network access control (NAC) and mobile device management (MDM), the companies announced.
The integrated product provides automation to detect unmanaged devices on the network and apply controls; over-the-air device configuration and corporate app catalog management; enforcement of passcode policies and encryption keys; mobile application blacklisting, minimum OS level verification, and device feature restrictions; ability to remotely locate, lock, and wipe lost or stolen mobile devices; a compliance rules engine; protection of personal information through sandboxing, preventing administrative access, disabling app inventory outside of corporate app catalog, and deactivating location services; and unified visibility, control, and compliance reporting for all mobile endpoint devices.
“This is a fully integrated platform that embraces everything from mobile device management to mobile application management and secure document sharing, as well as expense management”, explained Neil Florio, vice president of marketing at Fiberlink.
Scott Gordon, vice president of worldwide marketing at ForeScout, said that his company decided to team with Fiberlink in order to add MDM capabilities, such as containerization, sandboxing, application security, and data security, as well as the administration and provisioning, to its NAC product offerings. “That was an area we did not have in our product line that we felt we needed, given the tremendous momentum of BYOD”, he told Infosecurity.
ForeScout also plans future interoperability between its CounterACT NAC product and other MDM vendors via an integration add-on module, Gordon said.