Enterprise Security for iPhone has Many Elements

by , 5:00 PM EDT, March 10th, 2008

Now that the iPhone's enterprise capabilities are starting to appear on the radar of corporations, an understanding of just what mobile phone security means is important when evaluating its potential.

Some of those important elements are:

• Internal data encryption
• Dealing with attacks via the Safari browser
• Secure transmissions via VPN of plain text data
• Encrypted transmission over EDGE and 3G
• Bluetooth intrusions
• Remote wipe of lost or stolen phones
• Physical attacks on unattended phones

A few or all of these security aspects could be important to different customers based on how they expect to deploy the iPhone and the nature of the data used. For example, a large office products company deploying iPhones in the field for Salesforce.com account maintenance would have much stricter standards than a small businessman simply accessing his customer phone lists.

Just as with the Macintosh, creative developers will soon be in a position to offer a wide range of security tools and applications that merit Apple's blessing and meet the needs of customers. Moreover, the open source products that work so well with OS X will allow easy validation, certification and customer evaluation. That will lead to increased trust in the iPhone in the enterprise.