As employees are bringing smartphones to work more often and using them as productivity tools, many small and medium businesses are likely grappling with how to approach managing and securing all those new end points.
While enterprise-grade firms have been dealing with mobile device management (MDM) technologies for some time, it’s often not a space that SMBs are familiar with. With IT departments that are often either not large enough to implement and manage an in-house MDM solution, or just without the right skill set, most SMBs are going without a bring your own device (BYOD) policy at the office. But could using a cloud service be one way to change that?
That’s what Sophos is betting. Yesterday, it announced that it is now offering Sophos Mobile Control as a hosted service. The service will be delivered through managed service providers that are Sophos partners. By using this MDM solution as a service, businesses will be able to create device policies from a Web-based dashboard. There’s no hardware to set up or applications to chew up CPU cycles on a server – all a business needs is a Web browser.
Based on Sophos Mobile Control 2.5, the software is designed to secure a range of mobile devices entering an office IT environment. It can tap into your Active Directory groups to assign and manage devices and run compliance checks on employee devices. Administrators can push out apps to iOS users and remove those managed apps if an employee leaves the company or the device becomes compromised.
Do you think a cloud option is a good approach to take for managing mobile devices at a small business? Tell us in our Tech Outlook LinkedIn group and join the discussion ahead of our Sept. 27 event on cloud and mobility technology.