FLISH MADNESS day 5.  It’s been a rocking week of blog action and UCS training. I have enjoyed every minute of it.  We are closing out the week with concluding the conversation on End User Computing.

To review, we discussed the three things needed for EUC to be successfully deployed in a corporate IT environment.  The first two topics can be found here<a href="http://egroup.jasonmangone.com/end-user-computing-part-1-of-3#more-6229">(1) </a>and here<a href="http://egroup.jasonmangone.com/euc_part2#more-6246">(2)</a>.
<ol>
	<li>Device agnosticism aka BYOD (Bring Your Own Device)</li>
	<li> Application abstraction / Modern Application development HTML 5, Soap etc</li>
	<li> Secure MDM (Mobile Device Management)</li>
</ol>
Mobile Device Management

<strong>“Mobile Device Management</strong> (MDM) software secures, monitors, manages and supports mobile devices deployed across mobile operators, service providers and enterprises.”

If you Google MDM you will come up with a plethora of companies out there with products that are in this space.  The real challenge is giving the end user all the freedom they want but at the same time securing the data with encryption at rest and inflight.

One of the most interesting MDM solutions that is coming out soon is VMware’s Horizon Mobile Manager (still in beta).

<a href="http://egroup.jasonmangone.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/HorizonMobile1.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-6274" src="http://egroup.jasonmangone.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/HorizonMobile1.jpg" alt="" width="131" height="263" /></a>

Horizon Mobile Manager brings VMware’s core competency “Virtualization” to Mobile platforms.  It allows a corporate phone (running as a VM) to be separated from the personal phone.

Characteristics of the personal side:
<ul>
	<li><strong>Users have unrestricted access to their personal persona</strong></li>
	<li><strong>Download applications, make calls, share pictures, etc. </strong></li>
	<li><strong>The personal phone cannot be viewed/altered by the enterprise</strong></li>
	<li><strong>Private life remains private </strong></li>
</ul>
Characteristics of the corporate (VM) phone
<ul>
	<li><strong>The corporate workspace is completely enterprise-owned and controlled</strong></li>
	<li><strong>Ability to provision, manage and remove corporate data on employees’ devices</strong></li>
	<li><strong>Access to corporate applications and infrastructure support </strong></li>
</ul>
The corporate phone VM can have it’s own phone number and is launched with an app called VMware switch.

<a href="http://egroup.jasonmangone.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/VMware-switch.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-6275" src="http://egroup.jasonmangone.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/VMware-switch.jpg" alt="" width="118" height="69" /></a>

The base idea of this platform seems genuinely grand.  The user gets choice and IT gets the control and security they need.  However after bouncing this off a few customers and providing VMware with my own feedback I do have a list of improvements that need to happen before I see wide adaption of this platform.
<ol>
	<li>Currently this solution is only for Android.  iPhone potentially by the end of 2012 but most likely with a different type of approach.  (a la no VM phone)</li>
	<li>The VM does not run on bare metal.  Meaning it’s run more like VMware workstation then ESX(i). This can cause potentially very big security holes - code injections from malicious app into corporate phone VM etc.  (THANK SERGEI!)</li>
	<li> The solution does nothing to address any security concerns on the base phone.  For example, I down load a malicious piece of software on my phone and start spreading it all over my corporate WiFi.</li>
</ol>
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That’s it for FlISH MADNESS folks.  Look for more additional info on all the topics covered this week here on eGroup blogs.

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-Flish