A New Player in Mobile Application Management: F5 Networks

With the rise in enterprise mobility and Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) programs being developed in enterprises you now have another option to help secure your enterprise network and data. F5 Networks has recently announced the release of F5 Mobile App Manager which they say is a new hybrid cloud solution for Mobile Application Management (MAM). The solutions which caters to the growing BYOD trend allows enterprises to securely extend corporate applications and data to employees’ personal mobile devices while leaving all personal content under the control of the device owner.

The solutions offers the convenience employees realize from BYOD programs with the security It needs to manage a mobile workforce while keeping cost down due to the hybrid cloud model. The Mobile App Manager joins F5’s current unified access solutions and now brings organizations a suit of applications delivery firewall, application security and application access management capabilities. A list of the solutions capabilities from their recent press release are as follows:

• · Improved security – Using the App Wrapper functionality in F5 Mobile App Manager, IT can secure internally developed and third-party applications quickly and easily before making them available to employees on mobile devices. When F5 Mobile App Manager is used with BIG-IP APM, IT can create a secure application VPN for corporate applications. And because BIG-IP APM utilizes the customer’s on-premises identity stores, employee information stays on premises, minimizing the risk of identity theft.
• · Improved user experience – Employees are more comfortable knowing that their personal content is completely inaccessible to IT, won’t be automatically wiped in the event a device is lost or stolen, and that device functionality (such as the camera) cannot be restricted. F5 Mobile App Manager also requires minimal storage space on the device, and because enterprise applications don’t run constantly in the background, they help preserve battery life.
• · Cost savings and reduced IT overhead – Because F5 Mobile App Manager is a hybrid cloud solution, IT avoids costly hardware and infrastructure investments and saves time by managing and securing enterprise content only rather than entire devices. In addition, organizations that have been using MDM solutions reduce their VPN costs by handling only enterprise-related traffic rather than all mobile traffic (business and personal).
• · Scalability – F5 Mobile App Manager can easily be scaled to meet an organization’s growing demand to support employee-owned devices. The proven scale and performance of BIG-IP APM, which supports up to 200,000 concurrent users, ensures that the mobile infrastructure scales cost effectively.

Click here to read the full release and to learn for about F5 and their new Mobile App Manager solution.