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| [February 19, 2013] |
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F5 BYOD 2.0 Solution Empowers Workers to Merge Productivity and Lifestyle
SEATTLE --(Business Wire)--
F5
Networks, Inc. (NASDAQ:FFIV),
the global leader in Application Delivery Networking, today announced F5®
Mobile App Manager, a new hybrid cloud solution for mobile
application management that enables organizations to safely and
cost-effectively support enterprise BYOD initiatives. With F5 Mobile App
Manager, enterprises can extend corporate applications and data to
employees' personal mobile devices while leaving all personal content
under the control of the device owner.
F5 Mobile App Manager is a BYOD solution that combines the policy
management and secure application delivery features of the BIG-IP®
Access Policy Manager® (APM (News - Alert)®) with the scalability
and affordability of a SaaS offering. It is fundamentally different from
"BYOD 1.0" Mobile Device Management (MDM) solutions in that it securely
connects only corporate applications to the enterprise network, and it
manages only the enterprise content and applications on a device rather
than the entire device itself.
Employees prefer this approach because it isolates their personal data
from corporate oversight yet gives them the convenience of using their
own mobile devices for both work and personal use. For IT organizations,
F5 Mobile App Manager relieves the burden and responsibility of managing
employee-owned devices while still enabling them to control device
access to their network, track inventory, monitor threats and
vulnerabilities, and protect corporate information.
"As more employees want to use personal devices in the workplace,
enterprise IT has had to make tough choices: support BYOD initiatives
despite having limited security controls, impose complete control over
employees' personal devices using MDM solutions, or reject BYOD
initiatives altogether," said Mark Vondemkamp, VP of Security Product
Management and Marketing at F5. "F5 Mobile App Manager enables IT to
make intelligent BYOD choices that benefit both the company and
employees; it gives IT the control and flexibility it needs to protect
corporate resources without restricting an employee's use of the device
or infringing on their privacy."
As a hybrid cloud offering, F5 Mobile App Manager opens up new
opportunities for enterprises that have not yet embraced BYOD, enabling
them to do so without incurring the expense of deploying and managing
yet another solution in their own data centers. For organizations
dissatisfied with their MDM solutions, F5 Mobile App Manager provides a
secure, flexible, and cost-effective alternative that is less invasive
and restrictive for employees.
Details
F5 Mobile App Manager complements F5's existing unified
access solutions, which provide secure, accelerated remote access
and identity federation for SaaS applications. By implementing these
offerings in conjunction with F5 application
delivery firewall, application
security, and application access management solutions, organizations
can effectively protect their entire enterprise footprint.
Available for both Apple (News - Alert) iOS and Google Android mobile devices, F5
Mobile Ap Manager is simple and straightforward for employees to use.
It provides PIN-protected and encrypted enterprise applications,
including corporate email, a secure web browser, and an F5 App Store
from which corporate applications and content can be securely downloaded.
On the administrative side, F5 Mobile App Manager not only enables IT to
better protect corporate applications and data, it greatly simplifies
device management and policy enforcement. Using the management console,
IT can manage individual devices or device groups, push and/or retract
applications and data on a device, and lock or wipe only the secure
workspace rather than the entire device.
F5 Mobile App Manager delivers the following benefits to enterprises:
-
Improved security - Using the App Wrapper functionality in F5
Mobile App Manager, IT can secure internally developed and third-party
applications quickly and easily before making them available to
employees on mobile devices. When F5 Mobile App Manager is used with
BIG-IP APM, IT can create a secure application VPN for corporate
applications. And because BIG-IP APM utilizes the customer's
on-premises identity stores, employee information stays on premises,
minimizing the risk of identity theft.
-
Improved user experience - Employees are more comfortable
knowing that their personal content is completely inaccessible to IT,
won't be automatically wiped in the event a device is lost or stolen,
and that device functionality (such as the camera) cannot be
restricted. F5 Mobile App Manager also requires minimal storage space
on the device, and because enterprise applications don't run
constantly in the background, they help preserve battery life.
-
Cost savings and reduced IT overhead - Because F5 Mobile App
Manager is a hybrid cloud solution, IT avoids costly hardware and
infrastructure investments and saves time by managing and securing
enterprise content only rather than entire devices. In addition,
organizations that have been using MDM solutions reduce their VPN
costs by handling only enterprise-related traffic rather than all
mobile traffic (business and personal).
-
Scalability - F5 Mobile App Manager can easily be scaled to
meet an organization's growing demand to support employee-owned
devices. The proven scale and performance of BIG-IP APM, which
supports up to 200,000 concurrent users, ensures that the mobile
infrastructure scales cost effectively.
Beyond enterprise customers, channel partners and carrier service
providers (CSPs) can benefit from F5 Mobile App Manager as well. It is a
low overhead differentiated service that channel partners can quickly
make available to their customers because, as a SaaS offering, it can be
added to customers' existing BIG-IP APM deployments and it requires no
additional infrastructure changes or on-site installation. Likewise, for
CSPs that are looking to grow their average revenue per user (ARPU)
beyond voice and data plans, F5 Mobile App Manager can be resold as a
value-added enterprise managed service.
Supporting Quotes
"True mobility is network infrastructure-centric because all these
smartphones and tablets won't help us do the job without pervasive
access to data," said Zeus Kerravala, Principal Analyst at ZK Research.
"And as fast as it's being adopted, BYOD means headaches for the IT
organizations attempting to lock down more and more employee-owned
devices. F5's approach shifts the IT control point off the device and
onto the network by managing and securing only those apps that employees
use for work."
Availability
F5 will be demoing the F5 Mobile App Manager solution in Booth #1354 at
the 2013 RSA Conference in San Francisco February 25 through March 1.
The F5 Mobile App Manager SaaS offering will be orderable in June 2013.
Please contact a local
F5 sales office for availability in specific countries.
Additional Resources
About F5 Networks (News - Alert)
F5 Networks (NASDAQ:
FFIV) makes the connected world run better. F5 helps organizations
meet the demands and embrace the opportunities that come with the
relentless growth of voice, data, and video traffic, mobile workers, and
applications-in the data center, the network, and the cloud. The world's
largest businesses, service providers, government entities, and consumer
brands rely on F5's intelligent services framework to�deliver
and�protect their applications and�services while ensuring people stay
connected. Learn more at www.f5.com.
You can also follow @f5networks
on Twitter (News - Alert) or visit us on Facebook
for more information about F5, its partners, and technology. For a
complete listing of F5 community sites, please visit www.f5.com/news-press-events/web-media/community.html.
F5, BIG-IP, Access Policy Manager, and APM are trademarks or service
marks of F5 Networks, Inc., in the U.S. and other countries. All other
product and company names herein may be trademarks of their respective
owners.
This press release may contain forward-looking statements relating to
future events or future financial performance that involve risks and
uncertainties. Such statements can be identified by terminology such as
"may," "will," "should," "expects," "plans," "anticipates," "believes,"
"estimates," "predicts," "potential," or "continue," or the negative of
such terms or comparable terms. These statements are only predictions
and actual results could differ materially from those anticipated in
these statements based upon a number of factors including those
identified in the company's filings with the SEC (News - Alert).
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