As part of an effort to significantly increase its presence in the world of mobile computing, SAP this week unfurled a new cloud service for both managing and securing mobile computing devices.
Leveraging security technology from Mocana that wraps security policies around a mobile application and the Afari management platform that SAP gained via its acquisition of Sybase, the new SAP Mobile Secure service will secure and manage mobile computing devices and the applications running on them at a cost of $1.11 or one Euro a month per device.
According to Sanjay Poonen, president of the SAP Mobile Division, the goal is for SAP to become nothing short of the “Apple of mobile security” in terms of simplifying both the management and security of mobile computing devices based on Apple iOS, Google Android and Windows Phone 8 operating systems.
Launched at the SAP Sapphire Now 2013 conference, Poonen says SAP Mobile Secure will offer the lowest total cost of ownership for securing mobile computing devices on the planet.
Hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS), SAP Mobile Secure allows an IT organization or individual to register a device and then automatically start applying any number of policies to the type of content that device can be used to access. The service also includes access to analytic dashboards based on SAP BusinessObjects analytics applications.
Mocana Mobile App Protection (MAP), which was originally designed for use on embedded systems, adds fine-grained usage and security policies to mobile computing apps without requiring IT organizations to write any code.
Mocana CEO Adrian Turner says the problem with the rival approach to mobile device management is that they approach the issue from a tactical perspective that is focused on managing a device, rather than managing and securing the entire mobile computing environment.
As mobile computing becomes the dominant method through which people access content and ultimately engage in business processes, SAP clearly sees SAP Mobile Secure as an opportunity to insert itself into a mobile computing world that today is dominated by companies such as Apple, Google and Microsoft. Once there, the expectation is that SAP will be able to leverage that position to play a much larger role in the management of next-generation mobile computing applications and, just as importantly, the business processes attached to them.
