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#Citrix #XenMobile #MDM Integration With #Cisco ISE for #BYOD
Interesting and a good blog post by Sameer Mehta.
World of BYOD
Bring your own device (BYOD) initiatives are enabling employees to bring their own personal devices to work and allowing them corporate access to services such as Email. We did a recent audit using our ability to integrate with security incident and event management (SIEM) systems for a customer. The audit provided visibility into their ActiveSync traffic and found devices that belonged to executives that were not under IT management. Here’s a snapshot of their BYO devices.
There are several reasons to enable such access – for example, to boost employee productivity or convenience of accessing email from any device. Having said that, as Uncle Ben puts it, “with great power comes great responsibility”, and this responsibility is on the IT administrator from a security point of view. It’s IT’s responsibility to make sure that corporate data is not compromised or leaked in the following scenarios:
- What happens when this personal device is lost or stolen?
- What happens if this device is jailbroken or rooted?
- What happens if this device ends up outside an approved geofence. For example, outside of the US?
- What happens if the user inadvertently installs an application that has the ability and access to the entire device memory, thereby having unauthorized access to corporate data?
End User’s perspective on Enterprise Mobility
End users want access to corporate services such as email, intranet, ability to share and collaborate over documents, and also use 3rd party applications such as Evernote, Quick Office or GoodReader. With mobile solutions such as XenMobile MDM, CloudGateway, ShareFile and GoToAssist, Citrix provides ubiquity i.e. ‘access any app. from any device’, and a unified view for applications with an enterprise app store, documents via ShareFile. Having said that, since the user is accessing multiple applications; end user experience is a key component of mobility solutions. For example, bootstrap authentication and provide single sign on (SSO) to other applications.
Enterprise IT perspective on BYOD
As IT is providing access to corporate services, the main concern is around data loss prevention (DLP) and protecting corporate content on the mobile device. This means, encrypting data at rest for application data, and documents that are hosted either on Sharepoint, Network File share or Cloud storage. From a DLP perspective, for security conscious organizations, the mobile solutions bundle, which includes XenMobile MDM and CloudGateway…
Continue reading here!
//Richard
Magic Quadrant for Endpoint Protection Platforms – #Gartner, #EPP via @rspruijt
Magic Quadrant for Endpoint Protection Platforms
VIEW SUMMARY
The endpoint protection platform provides a collection of security utilities to protect PCs and tablets. Vendors in this market compete on the quality of their protection capabilities, the depth and breadth of features, and the ease of administration.
Market Definition/Description
The enterprise endpoint protection platform (EPP) market is a composite market primarily made up of collections of products. These include:
- Anti-malware
- Anti-spyware
- Personal firewalls
- Host-based intrusion prevention
- Port and device control
- Full-disk and file encryption, also known as mobile data protection
- Endpoint data loss prevention (DLP)
- Vulnerability assessment
- Application control (see Note 1)
- Mobile device management (MDM)
These products and features are typically centrally managed and ideally integrated by shared policies.
DLP, MDM and vulnerability assessment are also evaluated in their own Magic Quadrant or MarketScope analyses. Longer term, portions of these markets will get subsumed by the EPP market, as the personal firewall, host intrusion prevention, device control and anti-spyware markets have in the past. EPP suites are a logical place for convergence of these functions. Indeed, 53% of organizations in a recent Gartner survey1 already use a single vendor for several of these functions, or are actively consolidating products. In particular, mobile data protection is the leading complement to EPP and purchasing decisions regarding the two products are increasingly made together. For most organizations, selecting a mobile data protection system from their incumbent EPP vendors will meet their requirements.
In 2012, the large enterprise EPP market is still dominated by Symantec, McAfee and Trend Micro, which together represent approximately 68% of the total revenue of Magic Quadrant participants. Sophos and Kaspersky Lab are the two other global leaders that are competitive across multiple functions and geographies, and push the combined Leaders quadrant market share to 85%. Despite the introduction of new players, the displacement of incumbents is still a significant challenge in the large enterprise market. The biggest impact of the Magic Quadrant Challengers and Visionaries is to push the dominant market players to invest in new features and functionality (sometimes via acquisitions) to stay ahead, and to keep pricing rational. In the less demanding small and midsize market, competition is more intense. A number of Niche Player solutions are dominant in specific regions.
The total EPP revenue of the Magic Quadrant participants at year-end 2011 was roughly $2.8 billion, up 4% from 2010. We attribute this growth primarily to increased buying of more-expensive suites, offset by lower prices for low-end malware-only solutions. Consequently, EPP revenue growth is more a result of an inflow of revenue from other markets. We anticipate that growth will continue to be in the low single digits in 2013.
Microsoft is the best vendor in a position to challenge the incumbent Leaders, primarily due to attractive pricing in its enterprise agreements. Approximately one-third of enterprise buyers1 indicate they are actively considering Microsoft or plan to do so during their next renewal periods. However, Microsoft’s slow development, the lack of a single unified security management interface and mediocre test results will temper its adoption. Longer term, we believe that increased displacement of Windows endpoints with application-controlled OSs (such as Microsoft WinRT and Apple’s iOS and OS X Mountain Lion) is the biggest market threat. These solutions shift the value proposition of EPP solutions from traditional anti-malware to MDM and data protection capabilities.
Magic Quadrant

Source: Gartner (January 2013)
Vendor Strengths and Cautions
Arkoon Network Security
Arkoon Network Security’s StormShield EPP solution (formerly offered by SkyRecon Systems) is designed as a seamless integrated EPP with a focus on behavioral protection. Arkoon’s Ability to Execute score is hampered by its relatively small market share and limited geographic presence, as well as its still-maturing management capabilities….
Continue reading here!
//Richard