Irish technology firm Vordel is making a play for the growing ‘bring your own device’ trend in organisations by adding a mobile gateway to its portfolio. The Vordel Mobile Gateway is aimed at managing and securing traffic between mobile devices and on-premise apps or cloud services.
The solution aims to make it simpler to provide BYOD (bring your own device) access via access existing apps and data. The problem with many BYOD solutions is that most existing enterprise apps are not able to support mobile devices because they lack mobile-compatible application programming interfaces (APIs), said the company’s CTO Mark O’Neill.
The Vordel Mobile Gateway offers secure, mobile-ready APIs to new or legacy enterprise apps to allow enterprises to implement secure mobile strategies without the need for reprogramming.
The tool allows legacy apps to quickly and securely support mobile access via Apple iOS, Android or Windows Mobile. Vordel claims IT development teams can use their current on-premise security and identity management infrastructures with interfaces to handle data transformation, traffic monitoring and management, identity management and protecting against threats.
Security and the use of user-owned devices
O’Neill made a point of addressing the security concerns in bringing user-owned devices into the workplace. “Mobile devices pose a higher level of security risk than traditional desktop and notebook computers. These devices use light-weight operating systems that have less security provisions, and they are simply easily lost or stolen,” he said in a statement.
The market appears to be coming around to Vordel, which now finds itself at the epicentre of service-oriented architecture and cloud services. In 2011, the company achieved 90pc year-on-year growth and increased its global customer base by 25pc, adding 50 new organisations to its books.
It’s also reaping the benefits of a strategic alliance with Oracle, signed in mid-2011, which resulted in significant new opportunities and increased revenues.
The influential industry watcher Gartner has called BYOD an “unstoppable trend”.
In a recent BT survey of more than 2,000 IT managers, more than four out of five said enterprises with policies to allow staff to use their own computing device in work have a competitive advantage over other organisations.
