Barracuda Extends Secure MDM to Android

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Apple is popular, but hardly the only brand of smartphone or tablet wielded by today’s mobile workforces.

Barracuda, a Campbell, Calif.-based provider of cloud-based security and storage services for businesses, announced today that its Apple-friendly mobile device management platform, which originally targeted the iPad rollout programs of K-12 educational customers, now supports hardware that runs Google’s Android operating system (OS). Now, customers can leverage Barracuda Mobile Device Manager (MDM) to protect and manage mobile data that resides on the world’s most popular mobile OS.

Barracuda MDM plugs into the company’s broader Total Threat Protection initiative. The program, which encompasses the company’s product portfolio, “is designed to protect multiple threat vectors including email, web applications, remote access, web browsing by network users, mobile Internet access, and the network perimeter itself,” according to Barracuda.

Now those safeguards extend to more mobile devices and the sensitive data that they often contain.

“Mobile Device Management should be part of an integrated security solution that comprehensively secures all network threat vectors,” Sanjay Ramnath, senior director of product management at Barracuda, told Datamation in an email. “Organizations must extend their overall security posture to mobile devices, especially in BYOD environments, to avoid costly network breaches.”

Customers can implement policies requiring the use of passcodes and authentication credentials, on both iOS and Android. Organizations can also place restrictions on device functionality that can be used to leak data or ensure secure that users are protected by secure connections when they access their corporate networks (VPN) with their smartphones or tablets.

IT personnel can remotely lock or wipe a lost or stolen device when it goes missing. They can also keep an eye on mobile apps, with an app monitoring feature that flags unauthorized software.

Barracuda joins other companies like Sophos, Trend Micro and Kaspersky in incorporating data security capabilities into their MDM offerings. Earlier this month, Kaspersky announced that it was doing its part to help secure Android devices by enabling support for Samsung Knox 2.0.

A recent study from mobile app security specialist Veracode suggests that businesses need help in keeping their workers’ smartphones and tablets from leaking sensitive information.

The typical large enterprise has approximately 2,400 unsafe mobile apps operating in its environment, the company found. “Many mobile apps are unsafe because they unknowingly access insecure third-party libraries and frameworks in the software supply chain – while other apps have been specifically designed to perform malicious actions,” said Chris Wysopal, Veracode’s co-founder and CTO, in a statement.

Pedro Hernandez is a contributing editor at Datamation. Follow him on Twitter @ecoINSITE.

Photo courtesy of Shutterstock.