Mobile Device Management

I blogged about New Paradigm for the Modern Web few months ago when I came back from ForgeRock Open Identity Summit in San Francisco. 

Few weeks after I came back from the US, I attended the 1st Compuware APM User Conference in Singapore. I then blogged about New Paradigm for the Modern Web - Part II. 

I concluded that Cloud, Mobile, Social is not going to go away anytime soon. They will just get bigger, and we should better prepared ourselves for them.

Mobile - yes, this is the tiny little gadget that is getting very hot these days. Every company is finding ways to have corporate applications installed on the mobile devices so as to increase the productivity and mobility of their workforce. 

But security is the top issue. 

This morning, I came across an article from Citrix and looked further into XenMobile.

XenMobile delivers enterprise grade MDM with role-based management, configuration, security and support for corporate and employee-owned devices. Users enroll their devices, enabling IT to provision policies and apps to those devices automatically, blacklist or whitelist apps, detect and protect against jailbroken devices, troubleshoot device and app issues, and wipe or selectively wipe a device that is lost, stolen or out of compliance. Users can use any device they choose, while IT can ensure compliance of corporate assets and secure corporate content on the device.

This is the Mobile Device Management (MDM) offering from Citrix. Quite typical of any MDM product out there in the market.


But XenMobile attempts to offer more features…

The XenMobile App Controller is a SAML-compliant identity provider that connects to the enterprise directory, reads the authorization policies configured and provides the appropriate secure SAML tokens for user sign-on to federation-enabled applications. To interoperate with older applications that do not support SAML, XenMobile can act as a password manager, storing user credentials and providing them securely so users don’t have to remember their app credentials. Built into XenMobile is a long list of “connectors” for applications that have all the required interaction logic leveraging APIs that the applications expose; for example, APIs to create user accounts within those applications based on authorization policies. With App Controller, authorized applications are exposed to users through Worx Home, forming an enterprise app store and providing users a single place to authenticate and get access to all their enterprise applications. 

Pretty cool.

This gets me thinking … currently, we have ForgeRock Bridge SPE (of course, there is now the famous SalesForce Identity Connect) that helps Cloud Service Providers to federate identities between enterprise customers and the services they offer.

The next feature will definitely be able to bridge the gap between identities from enterprise customers (most likely, in-house Microsoft Active Directory) and MDM products. I do not think we should cross the path of building a MDM product from scratch. That would be too far-fetching.

This would be a one-stop solution.

Just my thought. What's your view?


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