Smart enterprise services offer an opportunity for telcoms operators to add value, and gain extra revenues. One area that operators have targeted is hosted or managed device management, to take away the IT headache of securing and managing a range of different devices and OS. Now Telefonica has developed a device management capability with VMWare to enable companies to assign two personalities to corporate devices – one for personal use and one for business use.
The Dual Persona service is part of the Telefónica Cloud Computing catalogue and is aimed at giving enterprises the ability manage the increasing diversity of devices that users bring into the enterprise. Initially the service will only be available to Android devices, although both companies said they are working to make the solution available to other operating systems and mobile platforms. The Samsung GALAXY S II will become the first Android device enabled to use Dual Persona. Samsung is also working with VMware and Telefónica to increase availability to other devices.
Telefonica said that with Dual Persona, a company’s IT department can administer employees’ work profiles and professional virtual smartphones on their Android devices whether they are personal or corporate devices.
Thanks to the mobile virtualisation technology supplied by VMware, each person’s professional profile operates alongside their personal one. On their personal profile, employees are completely free to install applications and copy or download information. However the professional profile is controlled by the company which decides which applications the user can access and which security programmes apply to that profile (for example, the need for a password to access their corporate profile).
The professional mobile profile is protected by encryption and can be blocked or erased by the IT manager if need be, for example if the phone is lost or stolen.
Users can switch from one profile to another with a simple click, and can configure it so that they can receive notifications from the applications in one profile whilst using the other.
Moisés Navarro, Director of Strategy and Cloud Services at Telefónica Digital said “The Dual Persona service brings benefits to both users and companies; the user can use just one device, for both personal and work use whilst still maintaining privacy; the company has greater control and security over corporate information, increased efficiency and cost savings on mobiles, shorter provisioning and incident management time and, logically, employees will be more satisfied; and all this is available on a pay-per-use model.”