What do you get when you embrace the BYOD movement, and let everyone use Android-based phone at the enterprise, for instance? You get “Enterproid Devices”. It’s might sound like a fancy name, as of this writing, but it’s likely that this will be a new way of life for corporate users pretty soon.
Consider this scenario: what happens if you – as a business user – were fiddling with your iPhone or an android-based phone and maybe you were checking email. Suddenly, there’s a notification for something related to the quotes that you sent for approval from a client. Now, you switch from your personal apps to another application with a business instance. After work, you may return to checking mail or chatting on Facebook – all this while you were away from your office.
Is that even possible? It seems to be, especially if Mobile virtualization takes off as a sustainable way of making mobile office a stronger reality.
Working on two different virtualization approaches called Type 1 and Type 2 approach, it’s possible to finally let mobiles be the new desktops. Type 1 runs at the root level of the phone and hence requires OEMs to co-operate. Type 2 works as a secure app on any device.
The BYOD conundrum is a scary one for most companies. According to IDC, employees will more than 55% of smartphones that will be used for business purposes. As such, the potential for reaching sensitive company information, unauthorized sharing of precious proprietary information, customer data, and everything else that the company depends on is at jeopardy. Hopefully, Mobile Virtualization seems to be able to work on this dilemma.
Mobile virtualization aims to partition mobile phones and tablets into personal and business instances or probably running two different Operating Systems on the same device. Working with technology suc h as Type 1 and Type 2 hypervisors, you could have choices to select one platform or the other right from the locked home screen or may just switch apps.
Mobile virtualization seems to be more promising for various reasons: BYOD is suddenly a manageable proposition; employees are more likely to accept the mobile virtualization policies rather than waiting for corporates to give them smartphones to use or to surrender phones for IT department to allow IT staff to deploy their gatekeeping measures.
Mobile virtualization is just porting virtualization itself to mobile devices and it’s not the “magic bullet” solution to raging problems such as data theft, data loss, rogue employee activity, and IT threats – that’s another ball game that mobile virtualization has nothing to do with.
What do you think about Mobile Virtualization? Do you think it’s the Holy Grail for the BYOD dilemma? Please share your views with us below.