Framehawk Inc.

It’s funny, the issues over the last 20 years in PC management have well-founded responses:

• Software push, streaming apps
• VPN (edge device analysis, intrusion detection)
• Citrix publishing
• Web and Middleware (presentation vs business logic)
• VDI

And yet nearly none of those have translated to these New Devices.  By that I mean Tablets.  Let’s face it, they are great for running my Kindle reader and Angry Birds, but for Enterprise domain or productivity apps, they fail.

Every day, I get a lot of questions about “solutions.”  In return I always ask two questions:

1) Where is the data?

2) If IT doesn’t trust these devices, what will make them feel better?

Let’s take them in order:

1) The data is generally behind a firewall.  Does any company want their data out where anyone can see it?  No. It’s simple.  Don’t leak your data.

(This simple fact kills the majority of the offerings: hosted MS Office, Dropbox-like offerings or even the SaaS offerings like salesforce.com.  We are finding many companies putting routing rules on salesforce – if you don’t originate from inside their corporate walls, you can’t access SFDC.  No one wants their prospect list or high net worth clients sitting in a stolen tablet/laptop’s cache.)

2) Trust….this is the basic challenge.  These devices tend to be smaller.  They are lent to family, kids, friends.  Taken to coffee shops and the mall.  No one carried around their laptop, but they will toss the tablet into the car.  So what’s the big deal?  Follow this logic, shared with me by a good friend:

• Often-carried means likely-to-be-lost – therefore IT needs to be able to “wipe” the data
• This means that the employee and company need to have an agreement:
  • Company gets rights to your device (that you paid for)
  • You must notify company if you lose your own asset (again, that YOU paid for)
  • (These conditions are creating stress in HR and Legal, in every company right now)

• Even if you agree to give up your rights, IT still doesn’t totally trust the devices.  They are a vector for viruses, yet they don’t have the horsepower to do intrusion detection or edge point analysis.  VPN is like opening a window and hoping the screen will keep people out.
• Tablets are a bad bet for IT.  IT finally can handle laptops (not always in a great way, but there are answers), but not tablets.

• So…..you can either control the employee’s personal asset or you can open a hole in your armor that you can’t evaluate the risks of.

And in either situation the access to the application is killed by mobile networks — loss, latency and bandwidth….but that is another story…

My point is, the reason BYOD is a big issue isn’t due to general devices or proliferation. It isn’t because tablets have captured people’s fancy and made the request more and more prevalent.

It’s because the Tablet offers promise, yet is too thin for IT.  IT has to say NO!  (or wrest control of your personal property).

And not having an answer in today’s day and age creates stress.

This is the part of the story where Framehawk starts to enter.  Framehawk not only solves this security issue, but increases performance and can be implemented in days.   More on that later…