Preparing for Dual Use (Corporate and Personal) Mobile Devices

A. Braunberg

Summary Bullets:

• No silver bullets for mobile application controls
• No single metric for success

Galen Gruman had an interesting article in InfoWorld last week, “Virtualization No Silver Bullet for Macs or Mobile” that got me thinking. While the article is actually chiefly about virtualization on non-Windows PCs/laptops it does make some important points about what is needed (and not needed) on mobile devices. To cut to the chase, what is needed is data/application partitioning. That is not news, of course, but the more interesting question that Gruman tackled is whether virtualization is the way to achieve partitioning of personal and corporate data and applications on mobile devices. He sees partitioning as one of the more compelling use cases for virtualization on mobile devices and I agree with that. But it is important to keep in mind that virtualization is just one of numerous techniques that are currently being developed to handle privacy, compliance and security concerns associated with dual-use devices.