Blackberry Alternatives for the Enterprise

Up until now, blackberry has had a dominant market in the Enterprise smartphone space. This was mainly due to the security that was enforced on the phone itself through policies defined on the BES server. Now that the iphone and android phones are picking up a lot of market, the security industry has realized the need to provide an enterprise infrastructure to support these devices. Not only is it because of the fact that these devices are gaining market share, but the younger generation are so used to these devices, that they may look at alternative employment to suit there own needs.
The following concerns come to mind when trying to deploy smartphones in the enterprise.

• Remote ability to wipe the device
• Encryption of data to the phone
• Passwords to lock the device
• Restricting usage (such as which apps are acceptable)
• Enforcing internet policy for content filtering
• Protection from malware.

Not only is it necessary for the devices to support all of the aforementioned abilities, but there must be a mechanism to deploy these policies from a central location.
Welcome to the new worldSeveral companies have already started down the path of providing a solution to meet these requirements:
Cisco Anyconnect Mobile (currently for Apple IoS 4)
VPN encryption to the enterprise network
Juniper JunOS Pulse (currently for Apple IoS 4)
Malware Protection, loss and theft prevention, vpn encryption to the enterprise network
Checkpoint for Iphone
VPN encryption to the enterprise network
Lookout (for android)
Loss and theft prevention
It seems the only client that is currently trying to meet all the needs is the JunOS pulse. But a combination of the other utilities can also meet the requirements. It seems it is only a matter of time before all the requirements will be met on multiple platforms for a mass deployment of multi vendor smartphones into the Enterprise. Until then, we must make do with what we have.