Vox Telecom at the forefront of IT consumerisation

Vox Telecom's new suite of enterprise mobility products and services aims to solve the biggest problem CIOs currently face: the security and integration headaches introduced by the proliferation of smartphones, tablets and other mobile devices in the workplace.

"It's become more and more difficult to safeguard critical company data," says William Hardie, Executive Head of the Enterprise Mobility division at Vox Telecom. "If your directors are carrying sensitive financial information around on their tablets, or attached to e-mail messages on their smartphones, you have a security breach waiting to happen. Yet IT consumerisation is here to stay: the boundaries between corporate IT and personal computing have broken down."

As part of its mobility strategy, Vox Telecom has secured the distribution rights in South Africa for MobileIron, which Hardie describes as a global leader in the provision of agnostic mobile device and multi-OS management for the enterprise - as outlined in Gartner's Mobile Device Management Magic Quadrant report.

"The key challenge is to seamlessly integrate these 'personal' smart devices, with all their proprietary protocols and operating systems, into the traditional corporate IT environment," says Hardie. "MobileIron has strong partnerships with Apple, Samsung, Android, Google, Microsoft, Nokia, RIM, Cisco and many of the large global mobile operators. This has enabled them to create a system that offers a simple, seamless way to bring mobile devices safely and securely into the corporate IT environment."

Hardie says the software offers tools that will protect not only data, but also company resources - for example, by limiting the apps that may be downloaded or used over the company network - without compromising users' private access to what is most often their own property.

Vox's enterprise mobility suite will also provide a platform on which Vox customers can develop their own mobile apps, without having to develop in-house capacity across several different operating systems.

For Vox Telecom, says Hardie, the move into the enterprise mobility space is also an opportunity to expand its strategic relationship with its clients. "Mobility and IT consumerisation are increasingly starting to dictate enterprise IT strategy," he says. "Vox Telecom is well placed to help our customers navigate this new terrain."