Apple gets serious about business: iOS 7 and enterprise adoption

Major tech companies are taking the idea very seriously since Apple announced new business capabilities in iOS 7, many of which focus on making iOS gadgets a better fit with companies' Mobile Device Management (MDM) strategies. Apple is finally serious about making iOS a plausible mobile business option, and Microsoft in particular should take heed.Single Sign On (SSO): With Enterprise Single Sign On, a business user has to log in only once to access corporate apps. A white paper from Mobile Iron, a mobile IT solutions company, noted that SSO in iOS 7 will only work on a trusted network with a Kerberos Domain Controller. What does that mean? Essentially, this means Windows Servers and environments,carbon cloth though other operating systems, like Mac OS X and Red Hat Linux, also include the Kerberos protocol for user or service authentication.aluminum foil tapePer App VPN: VMware's Srinivas Krishnamurti explained the enterprise capabilities of the Per App VPN feature in a blog post. Before iOS 7, enabling VPN on an iPhone meant the entire device would have access to the corporate back-end via the VPN connection – posing some security risks as well as transmitting an garage equipmentsemployee's personal data to the corporate network. With iOS 7 and any supported VPN product from vendors such as Cisco and Juniper, VPN connections are launched at an app level: IT can configure apps to automatically connect to the company's VPN only when they are launched. This is a good way to separate business from personal use on an employee's iPhone and gives IT more granular control over what is connecting to the corporate network. 

Open In Management: Krishnamurti noted that the Open In feature helps prevent data leakage because IT can now control which apps an iOS 7 device uses to open a document, through managed apps. Previously,kapton tape iOS users could pretty much use whatever they wanted to open a business document,BOPP tape raising the potential threat of data compromise. You don't want an employee to snap an image of a confidential company document and post it to Instagram, for example.Managed Applications Configuration: With a third-party MDM solution such as one from Mobile Iron, IT can configure apps with parameters specific to geographic regions, divisions, and/or security requirements. With such an MDM product, IT can push configurations, such as server name, username, and password, to managed apps on iOS 7 devices.Third-Party App Data Protection: Third-party apps use iOS 7 encryption by default, rather than depending on the app's developer to include that encryption.Other enterprise-oriented features include business licensing management of apps from the App Store, improvements with Mail and integration with Microsoft Exchange server, as well as faster downloads and access to content using Mavericks Caching Server 2 and iOS 7.