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If one of our employees has access to corporate email on a smartphone I want to make sure that if they lose the phone then whoever finds it can't get at any corporate email on that phone.

For iOS devices there is the iPhone Configuration Utility which looks like it can do what I want. Is there other similar software available on the other smartphone platforms?

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What email server do you use? Exchange has a raft of policies for that sort of thing. – Driftpeasant Dec 2 '11 at 15:18
We use Communigate. – paulmorriss Dec 2 '11 at 15:21
Note that that's not what the iPhone configuration utility does, exactly: it's a tool for setting up a lot of iPhones to have the same configuration. Everything it does, you can do manually on a particular iPhone. – Graham Hill Mar 29 '12 at 10:05
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That's very true. However, as I understand it, the phone user can't undo the settings once set with this utility. – paulmorriss Mar 29 '12 at 10:15
Ah, very good point! – Graham Hill Mar 30 '12 at 10:59

3 Answers

up vote 1 down vote

I've work with a number of organisations looking to address the same issue. Due to regulatory issues or just a low risk appetite, each organisation has gone down the enterprise solution level, so that is the point of view I will add advice from.

Each time one company has been the front runner for the provision of the service and this is a US based company called - Good Technology with their "Good for Enterprise" solutions.

They offer "Enterprise-Grade Security and Management for iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch"

Positives:

  • Safe access to corporate email, contacts, calendar, Intranets, and Web applications on iOS devices.
  • On-device encryption. Which protects the data from the device.
  • Ability to apply corporate policy templates.

And in terms of your question, offers the ability to perform a remote wipe of the data. With Good, the enterprise data is the only data wiped. Which if you are in an organisation that supports personal device use is a great option.

On the downside, all data passes through the US based network operations centre. So you may need to understand if there is any issues for you as an organisation. Also as this is an enterprise solution, so cost may also be a barrier.

Hope this helps.

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I was asking about non-iOS devices though. – paulmorriss Mar 29 '12 at 9:07
up vote 1 down vote

For Blackberry there is a lot of documentation here http://docs.blackberry.com/en/admin/?userType=2. It includes solutions based on your own servers as well as cloud solutions using their servers.

For Nokia this is the starting page: http://europe.nokia.com/find-products/nokia-for-business/security.

(feel free to dig deeper and update this answer with links/names of specific products that are equivalent to the iPhone config utility)

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up vote 0 down vote

I don't know if Communigate is able to remote wipe. I know Exchange can from server and some other products do it from the users mail login, I'd check the settings of both.

For iOS devices you can also remote lock or wipe from within iCloud as well as track the location of the device.

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The reason I didn't look at the mail server was because people can connect via POP or IMAP. Do those protocols include instructions for wiping data on the client? – paulmorriss Dec 9 '11 at 10:28

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