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BARCELONA, Spain—A new enterprise mobile management suite was unveiled by CA Technologies here at Mobile World Congress today to give more freedom to mobile workers so they can get their work done while still protecting the critical business data handled by companies.
One of the keys for the new product, CA’s Management Cloud for Mobility, is the inclusion of new “smart containerization” technology that allows enterprises to create policy rules to protect data as required, while at the same time giving employees more flexibility to do their jobs with the software tools they want to use for work.
“Enterprise mobility management in the past has been a big hammer approach,” Ram Varadarajan, CA’s general manager of new business innovation, told eWEEK in an interview here. “In the past, it has been a walled garden approach. The problem with that is you’ve got to get in and out of the walled garden all the time.”
At the same time, the software tools that businesses use to provide mobile access for employees are changing all the time, which makes it hard for IT teams to keep up with it all, said Varadarajan.
Now, instead of basic containerization, CA has created its “smart containerization” process, which scans and analyzes data for keywords and other markers to determine its sensitivity, he said. CA’s existing “data leak prevention” technology is used to help identify which content should be containerized, rather than always wrapping up all data into the protective cocoon of containerization, he said.
“The problem with [standard] containerization is that it takes away from the user experience,” said Varadarajan. With containerization, users have to log in and out of various applications as they conform to different security protocols to complete their work on a single machine, making it more complicated and potentially leading to people finding ways around it, he said.
Instead, smart containerization will help “keep honest people honest” while allowing them to do their jobs with more flexibility among needed applications, he said.
“Five years ago, people would do that” and switch applications as needed to finish their work to comply with containerization issues. “Today, they are intolerant of that, and they feel that it shouldn’t be a problem” for them to get their work done. Users think that it’s their company’s problem to solve, he said.
With the new suite, businesses can set policy rules based on keywords, user locations and many more attributes.
The suite, which is available as a cloud service or as an on-premises service, includes three parts: an Enterprise Mobility Management (EMM) component to manage and secure mobile devices, applications and content; a Mobile DevOps component to help with application development and deployment; and an Enterprise Internet of Things piece that is designed to assist businesses as they expand into the world of Internet-connected devices in the future.
Companies can buy the whole suite or can purchase components as needed, said Varadarajan.
CA has been working hard since early 2013 to refocus its products to better serve its broad customer base after the arrival of a new CEO at the time. CA, which began operations in 1976 as a business software innovator and later emerged as a corporate acquisition machine, has been hard at work driving new innovations in service management.
CA was founded in 1976 by the flamboyant Charles Wang and business partner Russell Artzt. Since then, CA has been one of the most acquisitive software companies in the history of the business. In the late 1980s, CA became the first software company to top $1 billion in sales. In 2005, CA launched a rebranding campaign, referring to itself as CA as opposed to Computer Associates. In 2010, it changed its name once again, to CA Technologies.