Great Infographic from the Economist (Economist Intelligence Unit, June 2013) indicating what type of technologies Enterprises are investing in….kind of speaks for itself, doesn’t it? (We love our TouchDown Email). Very interesting what the forecast is for the next three years. But wait, there is no mention of MDM’s… 😉
It is here!!!! If you’re ready to have excellent BYOD data security, without all the complications and cost of an MDM, check out:
Putting you at the Helm of your Enterprise Data Security
There is a lot of buzz going around the discovery that Samsung’s KNOX container has been found to have some vulnerabilities, as reported by the Wall Street Journal Tuesday and PC World yesterday. While it is very poor timing for Samsung, considering CES, the huge technology show in Vegas, starts next week, we are confident that Samsung is dedicated to security and will find a fix quickly.
What exactly is the concern? The vulnerabilities found by Israel’s Ben-Gurion University of the Negev indicate that Knox software (when used on a Samsung Galaxy S4 or Note 3) could allow malicious apps to eavesdrop on data transferred within the secure environment. The WSJ reports :“Samsung officials told the Journal that the vulnerability was found in developer phones that weren’t “fully loaded with the extra software that a corporate client would use in conjunction with Knox,” the paper reported. So far, the Knox vulnerability has only been discovered on the Galaxy S4.”
The PC World article compared KNOX to our TouchDown, since both are designed to keep data secure – so what does all this mean and how does it work? TouchDown was specifically designed to keep data secure against this type of data breach. It keeps corporate data secure through encryption and by keeping it ‘sandboxed’ away from a users personal data on their device (smartphone, laptop, tablet). It works directly with ActiveSync Exchange and keeps email, contacts, calendar and notes data secure when kept within TouchDown. Meanwhile Samsung’s KNOX creates a container around several third party apps, with the purpose of keeping data within those apps separate from app data not inside the KNOX container. The security breach discussed in the article regards the potential security breach of the KNOX container itself, meaning malware could have access to apps inside the container. If there are apps inside the container that are not secure, they could potentially be breached. Luckily, TouchDown users can breathe easy, since even if a malware attack did get past the KNOX container it would not be able to breach TouchDown data. So whether you are using TouchDown in or out of the KNOX container on a Samsung device, your data will remain secure and separate from other data on your device. If you’re not using TouchDown…what are you waiting for??
With the latest release of TouchDown for iOS in the Appstore and our developers working like crazy on the next Android version, we thought we’d give you a little holiday sneak peek at iOS version 2014…with some GREAT new features!! Enjoy 🙂
Today we get to hear straight from the mind of our developer himself!
Why TouchDown for Mac?
Some of you may wonder why NitroDesk, traditionally a mobile email product developer, would build a Mac version of TouchDown. TouchDown has traditionally been available on mobile platforms Android and iOS, but Mac is really a desktop platform. So what gives?
Last year when we switched from a pure android shop to build an iOS version, it forced some of us to start using Macs as our desktops (it’s hard to build an iOS app on a Windows desktop). Initially we got by installing parallels on the Mac and with using Outlook. We also had the native Mac client syncing our emails. But eventually we got tired of having to switch between Mac and Windows just to do everything unrelated to development (performance issues due to the two OSs, and the fact that we use Eclipse on Windows to build our android app was another reason – there are several legacy reasons why we could not switch to Eclipse on the Mac). So, we switched from Parallels to BootCamp to dual boot Win8 and Mac on the same computer. That made life easy in some ways (we could actually boot back and forth and get the job done – Eclipse would actually run in Win8 on bootcamp). Personally the best windows PC I have used is a Mac PowerBook Retina (shhh, don’t tell anyone).
This was a good move in a sense. This helped us focus on one platform at a time. The pain of rebooting to switch from iOS to Android was enough to prevent our minds from wandering.
But it caused a couple of problems
Every email received in the Mac Mail app was in plain view in Windows, when using Boot camp. While promiscuous sharing like this between platforms was just great when we need to copy files over from one platform to another, we were not too thrilled with the implications of this (each .emlx file contains the received message in base 64 encoding), which had some serious implications – consider this not too uncommon scenario:
Your CFO is traveling with a MacBook Air and an iPad. You have spent some serious coin on an MDM that would protect the email content on the iPad (probably even mandated the use of TouchDown and an MDM on your iPad). So your corporate data is more secure than Fort KNOX, with a GATE around it. Lose that iPad? You can whip out your cannon and do a remote wipe on it, disable it and nuke it to kingdom come. BUT what happens when he loses the MacBook Air? The MacBook probably syncs with either outlook or Mac Mail. It has waaay more data (no control on email history to download to it) than the mobile device you just nuked. This time around, all you can do is pray for the finder to simply format it rather than trying to get the data out.
YES, laptops are MOBILE! And Macs are vulnerable when they have a partition!
Consider this other scenario:
Your employees use Macs. Every email they send or receive is in that directory in plain text. Any application they may have downloaded from the internet (you can side load applications with no restriction on what they can do) can contain a Trojan which looks for the Mac Mail directory, enumerating, reading and decoding emails, contacts, calendar, notes etc, looking for passwords, credit-card numbers, (PHI if you are a hospital).
This was indeed an OH CRAP moment for us. We have been working hard for the past five years to protect your corporate information, and still we haven’t done enough for our corporate customers.
Hence TouchDown for Mac.
With TouchDown for Mac, all the data in the application is encrypted, so no other application can read or decode it easily. Without explicit user action, none of the email data or attachments can leak outside the protected sandbox we place around it. And no, They cannot be viewed in Windows if you dual boot. Boot away 🙂 “And there’s more!”
…and all the nice tweaks and productivity measures we have added to our mobile apps, and a future resplendent with new ways to work with your corporate email account. (GTD, MYN ? anyone?)
…and PUSH email with an exchange client without being limited to an IMAP connection.
…and the ability for you to import SMIME certs to the application sandbox (not the whole computer) and have touchdown use those to encrypt and sign your emails.
…and the ability to set your OOF.
…and the fact that it may even be a viable solution for implementing the Direct Project (http://directproject.org/content.php?key=overview) – Physicians love Macs (at least mine does), and if we can get them to communicate via secure email, we would have done some good.
Well then, Why NOT TouchDown for Mac!
-g
That appears to be a Sony Smartwatch 2…with TouchDown synced. Oh, yes, yes it is.
Yes, its secure – and really geeky cool. Live updates, on your wrist. Oh, the choices!!
Support for the Sony Smartwatch TouchDown is live now – and support for the Galaxy Gear is in development, and will be live shortly after release. We can not confirm or deny our work for the iWatch…….
Nitrodesk 