A two-year-old startup is looking to crack the BYOD conundrum by offering a virtual platform that separates work-related apps from personal apps on the same device.
MobileSpaces' mobile app management (MAM) strategy seeks to separate apps by creating an "app virtualization layer" that acts like a separate device, protecting business-related apps from personal information. With the company's release of version 2.1 earlier this year, that layer now enables support of the full suite of Google productivity apps across both Android and iOS.
"The manage-the-whole-device theory has evolved into a 'there's work and life, or business and personal, all on the same device,'" says David Goldschlag, the company's CEO. "You have to be able to manage each separately."
[See also: Reaching into patients' 'big desert' outside the doctor's office.]
That's been the rub so far with the crowded mobile device management field. Open up the network to any and all apps and you run the risk of data breaches and sensitive information falling into the wrong hands. Restrict devices in the workplace, and you'll have staff secretly using their own devices or losing faith in the system because they can't do what they want on the devices.
To put it more simply, mobile devices can help clinicians access data and communicate with other clinicians in real-time at the point of care, but they won’t win favor if those same clinicians can't call home, do their banking, show off family photographs or check the latest sports scores during their free time.
The solution, say Goldschlag and Dan Dearing, the company's vice president of marketing, is to create a sandbox, or container, in which all apps are welcomed, but the business-specific ones are bundled and protected. Each business-specific app is marked with a badge and managed separately through the cloud, enabling the enterprise to modify, add or remove apps as the user's needs change.
The opposite of the container concept is known as wrapping. In this instance, each app is embedded with a script that enforces security policies. Opponents point out that mobile device management vendors have proprietary wrappers and typically manage only a few apps, or a few dozen, limiting the enterprise's choice of allowable apps. That, in turn, has prompted many a developer to refrain from including the vendor's wrapper in their apps.
Goldschlag and Dearing see BYOD as a strategic shift that healthcare executives need to embrace. But they also have to prepare for the move, and recognize two assumptions:
1. "Don't assume the apps you're thinking of starting with are the whole world of apps you're going to be using," Goldschlag said. "Apps really are a tool, and those tools can change." In other words, prepare to be flexible, adding, removing and modifying apps as needed.
2. "Enterprises can't tell users what apps are permitted and what apps are not permitted," Goldschlag said. He points to a recent Gartner survey that predicts 20 percent of all BYOD policies will fail by 2016 because they're too prescriptive, thus falling out of favor with their users.
The challenge, then, is to secure the enterprise while enabling users to operate their devices as they see fit.
"BYOD requires the enterprise to become comfortable with the idea of attaching personal things to the device," Goldschlag said. "And let's face it: The enterprise doesn't really want to know what's going on in the user side. They just want to make sure" those devices are safe and secure.
Whether that's through creating containers, wrapping apps or developing some new system for BYOD management remains to be seen.
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