Five Tips for Executing a Winning Mobile Strategy
Managing VPNs has been a challenge for most IT organizations. Connections are usually fragile and updating VPN software every time a change to the IT environment is provided becomes a time consuming endeavor.
To simplify VPN management, at the Interop Spring 2014 conference, Dell announced the beta release of an update to its Dell Secure Mobile Access (SMA) offering, which gives IT organizations more control over which specific applications can utilize the VPN. Based on the Dell SonicWALL E-Class Secure Remote Access Appliance (SRA) and Dell SonicWALL Mobile Connect 3.1 software, this update is the latest extension to a larger Dell Enterprise Mobile Management portfolio.
Jane Wasson, senior product manager for Dell SonicWALL, says Dell SMA is designed to make it simpler for IT organizations to create and enforce mobile policies regardless of who owns the device or how the mobile app is being used.
At the application level, Wasson says that Dell SMA is designed to eliminate the need to recompile applications using software development kits every time there is a change to the mobile computing environment. In addition, Dell SMA gives IT organizations the flexibility to rely on VPNs to secure the entire mobile environment or any subset of it using application containers, while all the traffic between the application and the Dell SonicWALL appliance is encrypted.
Managing mobile computing has never been more complex. But as demand for access to enterprise IT service from mobile computing devices continues to soar, IT organizations will need to find a better way to manage those devices and applications. Wasson says in the case of Dell that means relying less on components that must be integrated by the customer and more on an integrated mobility management platform where all the required components needed to accomplish the job come pre-assembled.
The tools that most IT organizations have at their disposal today inflict a lot of unnecessary pain on all concerned, but it looks as though companies like Dell are beginning to offer some relief.
