How to Prepare Your Enterprise for Apple's iPad

While Apple's iPad is meant for consumers, employees already want to bring Apple's iPad into the enterprise. Before IT can deploy Apple's iPad, security, connectivity, personalization, integration and scale issues need to be addressed. By using enterprise mobility management, Knowledge Center contributor Mark Shull explains here how you can seamlessly and successfully integrate Apple's iPad into your enterprise.

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Today, enterprises are intent on mobilizing business applications to increase productivity, drive topline growth and improve customer satisfaction-in short, to improve business performance. With the release of the iPad, Apple has helped to accelerate when the enterprise will mobilize lines of business applications such as business intelligence, sales force automation (SFA), point-of-sale and document sharing, among others.

But before corporate IT can begin rolling out the iPad, there are five foundational underpinnings necessary for an organization to succeed with their application mobilization initiatives. These underpinnings are security, connectivity, personalization, integration and scale. Here, I will detail how enterprise mobility management (EMM) platforms can be used by the enterprise to address these foundational requirements.

Security

Enterprises are required to protect corporate data on devices such as the iPad, including business application data, user credentials, shared credentials, e-mail and personal information. To meet this requirement, organizations can rely on EMM platforms to reduce the risks associated with violations of regulations such as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), the Sarbanes-Oxley Act and the Federal Information Security Management Act of 2002 (FISMA), while enforcing compliance with corporate IT security policies.

Further reading

When selecting an EMM platform, look for one whose architecture leverages native security (for example, PIN and password, encryption, and local and remote wipe) and management features that are built into enterprise-class mobile devices. By properly configuring mobile devices-such as the iPad-to connect into an existing IT infrastructure, data services can be delivered while maximizing infrastructure investment-and offering the best possible experience to users.

By following this architecture, IT can provide the necessary security controls yet remain seamless and unobtrusive to users. Also, doing so does not negatively affect device performance, battery life or impact the productivity benefits of the iPad.