Mobile devices are everywhere they're ubiquitous.
I mean everybody's got a mobile device.
I would be hard pressed to name one person I know regardless age who does not have a mobile device.
OK maybe my grandson Steven but he's only one years old.
And knowing his mom or dad he's probably going to get one pretty soon anyway.
We love our mobile devices with my mobile device.
I can play Ingrid's I can get on Facebook I can use slack for messaging I can do all kinds of cool stuff.
The challenge with this is that phones are so cool that within a corporate environment we find ourselves
in situations where these are really really handy.
We could have a law enforcement person going around taking pictures gathering evidence that a crime
scene we could have a nurse walking around with her tablet checking out the charts of patients.
We get have a salesperson looking at critical corporate database looking at prices and customer names.
So we have all this really critical information that mobile devices are just perfect for handling this
creates a bit of a dichotomy.
In essence what's happening on one side we have the lovely personal use it on the other side we have
all of this corporate going on now.
The interesting part about every mobile operating system out there is that these devices are designed
from the ground up for amazing control.
We have whole groups of software known as mobile device management tools that allow me to do amazing
things I can for example take every mobile phone that I'm in control of and I can turn off all of their
cameras.
I can take every mobile device I have and I can turn off screen capture.
I can keep people from downloading applications so on a corporate side that stuff's absolutely fantastic.
You know on a personal side that can be a big issue.
Now the thing we need to think about here is that mobile devices are great not because of the device
in and of themselves but of the applications that they're running.
So we have mobile device management which actually controls the devices themselves.
And then we also have mobile application management which basically says look I'm not going to try to
control the entire device.
I just want to control the applications that are important to me.
Now we're going to be going through mobile device management and mobile application management in other
episodes.
But for right now what I want to talk about is this dichotomy of personal use versus corporate use.
Now if you think about this for a minute you could say well I'll just have two phones.
And that actually is an answer but there's some really really clever alternatives to that.
And what I want to do is just go through those alternatives and talk about mobile deployment options.
The first in all this type of deployment is known as corporate owned business only often called Kobo.
Basically it means the company owns it and they're going to do exactly what they want to do with it.
So you've got lots of control I mean it's the company phone we can say what applications go on.
We can say when encryption takes place we could say well wireless networks you connect to.
We control everything.
Cocoa is very very popular with really really high security environments.
And you also get lots of personal privacy because you're not going to use that phone at all for anything
you want to do.
So invariably Cobo means you're hauling around two devices an alternative is S.O.P which means corporate
owned personally and enabled in this particular situation everybody has the exact same device.
You get great control because it's still a corporate device.
But you do have a bit of a Big Brother issue because people will still often want to use their own device
because of their concern about their privacy.
The other big problem with S.O.P is the learning curve.
If you start handing Android devices to iPhone users you'll often find that they're very happy to carry
two phones.
Next is C-y O.D. or choose your own device.
In this particular scenario your users get to select from a list of approved devices.
It's still a little bit Big Brother but hopefully there's a lot less learning curve because people will
tend to gravitate towards the mobile operating system they're familiar with probably the hot one right
now is BYOB or bring your own device.
In this case it's fantastic because people are buying the devices they like and know.
So learning curves tend to be very very short.
But how do we control the users.
In this case we're talking about very heavy mobile device management as well as mobile application management
but we'll catch those in another episode.
I want you to take some time and think about why would we do Akobo versus a BYOB.
Think about it in terms of privacy versus the needs of corporate to be able to provide good mobile device
management.