In October of 2010, Symantec publicly announced its mobile protection strategy, defining a new era in how Symantec secures and manages the information and identities of consumers, businesses and governments in an increasingly mobile world. At its core, the announcement laid out our protection strategy and approach for enterprises, consumers and communication service providers.
That approach is still at the core of how Symantec is addressing the larger mobility trend. However, we continue to strengthen and refine our approach as advancements in mobility develop and changes to the mobile threat landscape evolve. In that regard, Symantec announced some significant advancements to its overall mobile strategy in February of this year and demonstrated that we have delivered on our mobile strategy. Some of those advancements hinged on the acquisition of Odyssey Software.
Odyssey is a mobile device management (MDM) provider that has developed a novel, modular platform that enables mobile device management from a variety of on-premise and SaaS solutions. Odyssey’s technology compliments Symantec’s existing MDM solution, enabling us to now offer an even more robust MDM to manage Android, Windows Phone7 and iOS devices, all with integration into two of the most widely deployed systems management solutions in the world: Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM) and Altiris IT Management Suite (ITMS) from Symantec.
Even more recently, Symantec announced the acquisition of Nukona, a top company in the burgeoning mobile application management market. With Nukona’s ability to natively protect and control iOS, Android and HTML5 apps, Symantec will address the core problem of corporate and personal data separation without limiting the end-user experience or application adoption. By securely distributing and managing mobile applications and content, Symantec customers will be able to address corporate data security concerns around data loss prevention, encryption and authentication on a per-application basis, for both BYOD and corporate owned devices.
Overall, Odyssey provides the MDM foundation to enroll and manage all necessary device settings across a broad range of platforms, while Nukona provides an innovative approach to seamlessly distribute, secure and control applications and data without requiring the enterprise to manage the devices.
By offering both cross-platform mobile device and application management, Symantec will enable CIOs to say “yes” to the onslaught of digital natives – people born in a world of connectivity – demanding to use devices and apps of their choice. Symantec will help customers secure enterprise critical mobile apps and data while managing and protecting them with policies, including authenticating users, encrypting sensitive files, preventing data leakage and selectively wiping corporate data.
Combined, these announcements and acquisitions make Symantec the first company to offer a single solution to manage and secure everything enterprise IT cares about when it comes to mobility: devices, apps and data. Add to this that this capability comes from the same company they already rely on to manage and secure every other aspect of their infrastructure and enterprise IT just got a whole lot simpler.