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Thursday, 20 October 2011

iCloud and the iPhone 4S in the enterprise

As soon as the iPhone 4S was announced, I started hearing the question, “When will there be an iPhone 4S jailbreak?”


Forgetting the fact that the first rule of iPhone jailbreaking is to never ask when, we’ve been doing our best to follow the jailbreaking efforts of iOS 5 and the iPhone 4S.


iOS 5 is already jailbroken on a number of devices. Here’s How to Jailbreak iOS 5 for iPhone 4, iPhone 3GS, iPad, and iPod touch.


An iPhone 4S jailbreak is, unfortunately, still some time off.


The dev-team is working on it and reportedly has a lead on jailbreaking the iPhone 4S and the iPad 2. These two devices are proving more of a challenge thanks to the new A5 processor, but progress is happening.


While we wait for an iPhone 4S jailbreak to arrive, I wanted to share 5 reasons I want an iPhone 4S jailbreak sooner, rather than later. While several of these address my concerns of switching from Android to iPhone, I’m sure most of you will find at least one of these that you like.


This is a rich set of features for consumers, as it ensures easy access to virtually all data that's supported by Apple's iOS 5 as well as the security of having a backup of core iOS information that can be restored anytime, anywhere.


While that ease of access is great for end users, it raises serious questions for iOS devices used for work, be those devices company-owned or, as is increasingly the case, employee-owned. Given that the service debuted only last week -- and had a problematic rollout at that -- there are now more questions than answers. If iPhone users in the workplace start asking about using iCloud, ask yourself these questions:


Will confidential corporate data such as documents, global contacts and emails be synced to a user's home computer? Might they reside on Apple's iCloud servers after a user has left a company? What if someone gains access to a user's iCloud account by stealing a device or through a phishing or social engineering attack? Could photos taken with an iOS device in the office be pushed across a range on devices and computers by iCloud's Photo Stream feature?


Even more concerning is the uncertainty about whether users are putting business information onto their device(s) and into iCloud. At this point, how would an IT shop know?


What appears to be a great consumer feature could turn out to be a professional minefield. Caution is warranted.


By far the biggest enterprise addition in iOS 5 has to be the ability for companies to make volume purchases from the App Store and then make those apps available to users.


Getting business apps onto iOS devices has been a big challenge since the App Store went live three years ago. Until recently, the only option was to have users purchase or download apps manually using their own iTunes accounts (possibly with company reimbursements or through iTunes gift credits). This approach was far from streamlined and even opened the prospect of users taking an app and all of its data with them when they left a company.


Apple's volume purchase plan resolves that issue by allowing organizations to purchase apps for deployment to user devices. The MDM service in iOS 5 even goes a step further by letting administrators manage volume purchased apps on devices -- which means they can wipe any corporate-bought apps and associated data from employee-owned devices at any time. This also combines well with the ability provided by almost every MDM vendor to create an internal app storefront containing both internally developed and App Store apps.


A few other useful tidbits
iOS 5 offers a few other useful enterprise abilities worth noting. These include:


Configuring Web proxies
Specifying whether certificates from untrusted sources can be accepted
Limiting the wireless networks a device can join automatically
Limiting data and voice roaming (and specifying whether iCloud data sync can occur while roaming)
Querying managed devices for battery life information
Enforcing the use of S/MIME in Mail
Notification if a user disables MDM management profiles on a device; some vendors allow automatic deletion of corporate data and volume-purchased apps.


All about iPhones:

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