Enterprise mobile virtualization improves the work efficiency of mobile office workers and remote office workers

Ubiquitous smartphones, tablets, and other wireless devices enable employees outside the company—whether on the road or at home—to access the company’s network. Adapting to this kind of enterprise IT “consumerization” needs, allowing employees to purchase and use their own equipment, brings difficult challenges to enterprise infrastructure and important data and applications that use these data.

Mobile virtualization can reduce the burden of corporate mobility, simplify the work of IT staff, and provide mobile office workers and remote office workers with a secure platform to run corporate applications and use company data. At the same time, these mobile office workers can continue to enjoy the functions and fun brought by smart phones outside of the boss’s monitoring.
Status Quo-Mobility brings opportunities to improve production efficiency
Since the 1980s, companies have begun to provide employees with a variety of personal devices-first desktop computers, then mobile phones and laptops, and more recently smart phones and tablet computers. The motivation for investing in these assets and equipment is to contact employees at any time and improve the efficiency of the enterprise, expand the contact information through voice and email, facilitate access to the enterprise information system, and provide employees with various tools so that they can achieve the same regardless of whether they are in the office or not. efficient.

The results were mixed. The challenges of mobile return on investment include:
• Access: Due to the uncertainty of security policies and various remote networks (VPN, hotel broadband, etc.), only limited access to company systems is possible.
• Maintenance: It is expensive to purchase and maintain remote hardware, activate remote access, and perform real-time hardware and software updates.
• Consumerization: Employees are dissatisfied with the computers, phones, and tablets provided by the company, and employees are more inclined to use mobile hardware of their choice.
• Security: Random use of company-provided equipment (employees browsing web pages, downloading content, etc.) brings risks of malware and other attacks to the company’s network and assets.
At present, the improvement of VPN technology and ubiquitous broadband (WiFi, 3G, etc.) have solved most of the access problems. With the popularity of consumerized equipment-smart phones and tablets that employees use at their own expense or use subsidies to purchase for their own use, employee satisfaction will increase and maintenance costs will decrease.
Another weak link in corporate mobility is security.
IT challenges-impossible tasks?
Enterprise management authorizes IT personnel to support “consumerized” enterprise mobility: employees who work remotely can not only log on to the company network through PCs and laptops, and through IT-audited hardware, but also through their own Android smartphones and others. Wireless devices, log in to the company network, access the company’s database and mail server, and run important business applications. The purpose of this is to keep end users efficient (and enjoyable) without sacrificing the company’s hard-won security; enabling them to move without exposing the company’s confidential and customer information to crackers and pirates And other hackers.

Before finishing the resume and stepping out the door, IT staff may consider doing something unpleasant:
• Lock mobile applications and blacklist all non-work related websites.
• Clear employee phone records and install clean and safe company software (if possible).
• Only support 1 or 2 types of handheld devices and tablets that can be purchased and used by end users.
Due to technical and practical application reasons, the above schemes are not realistic. So, what should the company do?
The end user’s problem
After Christmas, employees in sales, support, marketing, development, finance, equipment management and other departments returned to the company with brand-new smartphones and tablets as gifts or purchased by themselves. These devices are not only used for communication, but also change lifestyles. The applications they provide can help manage diet and exercise, participate in social interaction, coordinate schedules, communicate with family at any time, education and entertainment, etc. These devices also support web browsing, emails, notes, report writing, financial models, etc. through the touch screen that people love. Most of these were high-efficiency activities that were run on PCs or laptops.
Employees who are eager to experience this new type of mobility in the workplace or outside the workplace have shared with us their stories of experiencing corporate mobility, which is worth learning:
• Joe from the Finance Department asked IT to set up his smartphone, and now he can’t trade stocks (or play games or watch videos) in his spare time;
• Wendy of the sales department installed the company’s CRM and inventory management tools on her web pad. She can no longer browse competitors’ websites and read her favorite blogs;
• In order to comply with mobile security regulations, R&D staff Chad and IT staff Michelle had to delete network detection and console tools from their wireless devices;
• Fiona at the front desk can no longer Display her favorite screensaver or browse Facebook during the break;
• Everyone also realizes that the software installed by the company may be able to track online browsing or downloading. With GPS phones and tablets, they can now consider adding their location as a privacy item.
Everyone has lost something-familiarity, personality, practicality, privacy, and the most fundamental is efficiency and freedom-the freedom to use their own equipment at will.
So what is the result? These mobile employees either give up the company’s corporate mobile services, or carry at least two devices with them: one for company business and the other for their personal mobile phones or tablets.
Ways to achieve enterprise mobility
A variety of technologies and solutions have emerged on the market to meet the “dual role” challenge of personal and professional mobility:
Cloud-based portals-Cloud computing affects the entire enterprise IT field including mobility. Web applications and cloud-based (virtual) servers transfer corporate assets and applications from the headquarters’ data center to the global network. Cloud-based mobility usually supports e-mail (webmail), consulting services, and database applications (such as CRM), as well as XaaS (“everything is a service”) specification. The disadvantage is that *XaaS changes the user experience, especially the experience on traditional mobile and PC native applications.
Application-level containers-The shortest way to deploy enterprise mobility is to encapsulate/protect important mobile device assets. Separate the “container” application (metaplatform) project and separate enterprise applications from mobile devices by providing dedicated and secure mail clients and other applications (but not expected local applications, nor traditional enterprise applications).
Encryption-not only is an enterprise mobility solution in itself, but also means protecting the content on the device and the data in transit. Other solutions can use the original encryption of the platform (if any) or use its own encryption engine.
Mobile device and software management (MDM/MSM)-software components and service suites, partly on mobile devices and partly on back-end servers, can provide device management, configuration, tracking, locating, and erasing functions. MDM suites can often integrate multiple technologies.
System-level solution-using mobile virtualization (type 1 hypervisor) to store important enterprise software and data on a secure virtual machine, isolating them from the open end-user environment.
The three pillars of enterprise mobility
The success of corporate mobility depends on the following three factors: security, privacy, and freedom. Security is for corporate communications and assets, while privacy and freedom are for device users.
Through the following table, let us see how certain leading technology methods enhance corporate mobility, but at the same time affect security, privacy and freedom. Please note that these methods are not independent of each other, in many cases they complement each other.

Mobile virtualization
Virtualization provides a safe, isolated and reliable operating environment for various programs (including Android and other OS), which is no different from the actual bare metal hardware. The virtual machine (VM) environment mimics the actual computer hardware and isolates the guest software stacks from each other. A software layer called a hypervisor provides a virtual machine environment and manages virtual machine resources.
Mobile virtualization is similar to the data center, running under the OS and other applications and software visible to the end user (Figure 1). It is based on Type I “bare metal” virtualization, which is different from Type II hypervisors, which run in the OS in the form of applications (II virtualization usually runs on desktop systems, such as VMware Workstation/Fusion and Parallels) .
Mobile virtualization not only provides an ideal foundation for enterprise mobility, but is also deployed in mobile devices for various other purposes—providing hosts/partitions for traditional baseband RF software, and reducing costs through chipset integration. The ultra-secure, certified “Super Phone” achieves military-grade security.
in conclusion
Among the various options for safely achieving corporate mobility while retaining the privacy and freedom of end users, only mobile virtualization can constantly balance these three pillars. Other solutions have also tried to achieve the dual-role function, but they have lost the essential foundation of security, privacy, and freedom.
Mobile virtualization is built on the widely deployed, hardware-based hypervisor technology, from the hardware to the software stack, which isolates the personal and company environments from the architectural level. When security is no longer an afterthought, security can be tailored to adapt and strengthen user privacy and ensure the end user’s experience.
Please visit http://www.ok-labs.com to learn more about Ok Labs mobile virtualization and SecureIT Mobile (an enterprise mobility platform based on mobile virtualization).