With more businesses trying to safeguard the data on their employees’ mobile devices, a growing number of security vendors are bringing out mobile device management products.
Enter MobileIron Inc., which has just launched Help@Work, a mobile screen sharing app for Apple iOS. Employees using the app can just tap the screen once to share their iOS screens with the IT department, so nobody has to spend time trying to explain or understand a problem with the mobile device.
Screen sharing sessions allow IT to see the entire device, but employees will always be able to confirm what IT staff can see so they can preserve their privacy. For IT administrators, the app is easy to deploy, and it will work using WAN, Wi-Fi, and cellular networks.
Along with Help@Work, MobileIron is also releasing a virtual private network (VPN) tunnel on iOS. Branded as MobileIron Tunnel, its VPN tunnel works on a per-app basis, meaning only selected apps are connected to back-end systems. That protects any data being transferred between devices, or between the mobile device and the network.
MobileIron Tunnel can work for almost any of the apps sold in the App Store, as well as a company’s proprietary apps, but IT administrators will be able to block unapproved and personal apps from using Tunnel. That gives the employee access to privacy, as well as providing another layer of security for the company. Employees can authenticate use of the MobileIron tunnel through iOS7’s single sign on feature.
And finally, MobileIron has also announced two integrations with Splunk Inc., a company providing big data gleaned from websites, applications, servers, networks, and mobile devices.
One integration will see Splunk software baked into MobileIron’s platform, allowing for the extraction of more than 200 machine data fields per mobile device. This will show companies what their mobile environment looks like, as well as data on the health of their systems. Splunk will then pull that data into Splunk Enterprise’s software, linking it to other IT data.
The other integration combines the MobileIron app with Splunk Enterprise, allowing it to work with Splunk and to provide it with data visualizations of the mobile IT machine data. Users can generate graphs, reports, alerts, and dashboards using the app.
All of MobileIron’s new solutions are generally available.
In terms of pricing, MobileIron Tunnel and Help@Work are both part of MobileIron’s Platinum Bundle, which costs either $125 per user for a licence or $84 per user per year.