Mobile technology and software specialist Enterproid announced the launch of Divide Builder, a mobile toolkit that allows companies to independently create and distribute a corporate-branded bring-your-own-device (BYOD) workspace on their employees’ mobile devices.
Divide’s dual-persona software creates a safe container that allows companies to enforce their security policies and manage the business apps and data inside the Divide workspace. This partitioned workspace, which comes standard with a suite of business apps for mail, calendar, contacts and more, allows companies to secure only the business side of the device, without sacrificing the degree of control that they have.
The platform is designed to allow employees to enter Divide’s virtual environment without compromising their company’s security and then return to their personal mobile device experience knowing their personal data is private.
“Maintaining a discrete corporate workspace separate and distinct from a personal workspace is the only way to ultimately manage and secure enterprise data assets on BYOD,” technology analyst Jack Gold, president of J.Gold Associates, said in a statement. “Creating a user friendly and corporate identified container such as available with Divide Enterprise enables companies to tailor and personalize the business side of devices for maximum user productivity and minimum support costs. We expect all containerized BYOD to ultimately move in this direction.”
With Divide Apps, companies can distribute business applications directly over-the-air to specific workspaces based on group policy. Divide Apps are automatically secured and given access to IT services based on global policies provisioned for each workspace container, making it possible for companies to scale and customize their BYOD deployment.
In addition, Divide Connect allows workers to connect from Divide’s workspace to company resources over an existing secure tunnel through the corporate virtual private network (VPN). Work apps can access enterprise services while personal apps are unable to utilize the Divide Connect VPN. Rounding out the package is Builder, a customization and branding tool that allows companies to control more than 1,000 user experience elements including colors, logos and names as well as utilize their own icons and assets.
“Divide Builder puts companies, specifically their IT department, in control by being able to create a secure and productive BYOD experience,” Enterproid co-founder and chief operating officer Alexander Trewby said in a statement. “By completely owning the BYOD experience, CIOs are able to win the hearts and minds of their workers by providing an employee-friendly native environment that also reflects their corporate brand.”
As the use of personal devices on corporate networks increases, 54 percent of network managers reported user experience improved while using mobile devices, but more than 40 percent indicated their ability to monitor applications worsened, according to a Network Instruments survey conducted at Interop Las Vegas 2013 earlier this month.
When listing the biggest challenges in managing portable devices, just more than half (51 percent) of respondents indicated identifying and tracking mobile devices as the major concern. That was followed closely with tracking security vulnerabilities and patches (47 percent). Meanwhile, troubleshooting portable devices caused problems for 42 percent of the survey participants.