Background
In the past, organizations used to strictly enforce the COPE (corporate-owned, personally enabled) model on mobile devices to ensure data security. However, multiple users can use a single COPE device, reducing the level of accountability and increasing the level of vulnerability. Today swipe-savvy smart phones have flooded the market due to the evolution in mobile devices. As a result, organizations are getting accustomed to adopting the BYOD (bring your own device) program, which allows employees to use their personal mobile devices to access valuable corporate data and applications. This helps to increase employee collaboration, efficiency, and productivity; however, the organization is vulnerable to security threats. Therefore, organizations have a growing need to monitor and manage corporate and personal (employee-owned) mobile devices that have access to corporate data.
Overview
WSO2 Enterprise Mobility Manager (EMM) is a unique solution designed to specifically address the mobile enterprise needs. EMM includes of two key aspects: Mobile Device Management (MDM) and Mobile Application Management (MAM). WSO2 EMM also supports single sign-on (SSO) and multi-tenancy.
EMM enables organizations to secure, manage and monitor Android and iOS powered devices (e.g., smart phones, ipod touch devices and tablet PCs), irrespective of the mobile operator, service provider, or the organization. Users need to accept the policy agreement, which states all the actions that can be carried out on the device when enrolling with EMM. EMM only controls the corporate data that is present on the devices, while the personal data is left untouched.
The administrator can create policies in EMM and define the device management rules, blacklisted applications and list of applications that need to be installed when the policy is enforced. EMM policies can be set at various levels, namely user level (L1), platform level (L2) and role level (L3). L3 policies have the lowest priority. L2 policies override L3 policies; while, L1 policies override both L2 and L3 policies. When employees register their devices with EMM, the applicable policy rules (e.g., enabling the phone lock, disabling the camera, and more) will be enforced on their devices. WSO2 EMM constantly monitors all the registered devices for policy compliance. WSO2 EMM will automatically generate a notification and carry out follow-up actions in the event a device is in violation of the enforced policy. The administrator can select the follow-up actions (e.g., send the user a warning message, enforce the policy again, and more) based on their security requirements.
WSO2 EMM consists of three key consoles: EMM Console, Publisher and Store. Users use the Publisher to manage enterprise apps throughout their application life cycle, which includes application states such as, published, unpublished, approved, rejected, deprecated, and retired. The Store acts as a marketplace and contains all the corporate mobile apps, which users can search, view, rate and install on-demand. The administrator uses the EMM Console to manage users, administer EMM policies, install or uninstall mobile apps in bulk, and more. Furthermore, WSO2 EMM is released under Apache Software License Version 2.0, one of the most business-friendly licenses available today.
See the WSO2 screencast for a step by step tutorial on how to get started with WSO2 EMM and for an overall explanation of the entire EMM console.