By Alun Lewis
Timico, a UK B2B ISP specialising in the SMB market, has partnered with Sybase to introduce Sybase Afaria, a cloud-based mobile device management and security service specifically aimed at the SMB market.
Compared with the IT vendor community, most mobile service providers have been slow to target the Small-to-Medium Business (SMB) market, despite its size. However, as this sector increasingly adopts smartphones, they’re going to start running across many of the same problems to do with device management policies – and especially security – that already affect many large enterprises.
“We’re currently experiencing a smartphone explosion and tremendous growth in mobile data usage,” Trefor Davies, CTO at Timico, said. “That’s leading to a proliferation of employee owned devices being brought into the workplace and used for business purposes which in turn causes security concerns with corporate data being kept on personal handsets. On top of that, SMBs are also beginning to use iPads and other tablets and smartphones for genuine workplace productivity applications. Now, when you see recent Home Office statistics that over 200 mobile phones were reported stolen in the UK every hour in 2009 alone, the security of personal mobile devices brought into the workplace is clearly a problem.”
To complement its device and security management offerings, Timico is also investing in additional connectivity to provide multi-tenant Mobile Access Management Services, allowing SMBs to securely extend their networks onto mobile devices without using the public internet – allowing them to filter or restrict internet access without the need for a VPN.
This is the first ‘multi-tenant’ service from an O2 service provider in the UK.