Android security acquires a “New Meaning” with Samsung KNOX

 Candy Crush, WhatsApp and Facebook or Salesforce, Webex and Citrix? BYOD, CYOD, COPE are the buzz words in the enterprise mobility space that points to one large trend – employees want to bring in their choice of device and employers want to make sure that the data being accessed on these devices stay secure. Companies in India that permit these policies mostly allowed only email to be accessed from the mobile devices. But that is changing at a rapid pace.

As business expands beyond geographical and political boundaries, enterprises are forced to look at enabling business as fast as possible to increase productivity and revenue. Be it Salesforce automation, Supply chain management, Mobile Analytics, healthcare, HR, etc have become important tools for the Indian workforce to be readily available on their mobile devices.

The Indian enterprises were very reluctant to the BYOD trend initially. But as BYOD Solutions matured and added cloud solutions, enterprises started seeing the business edge and financial advantages and started embracing BYOD in a big way. While BYOD spread, Android has become the most preferred platform in the BYOD scenario and, according to market figures, Samsung is leading the pack with nearly 40% of this mobility pie. To rightly balance the personal and work requirement, Samsung, in its leadership responsibility, has introduced Samsung KNOX, the most secure platform available for BYOD in today’s Android landscape.

Samsung KNOX is a holistic enterprise platform that provides enhanced security and container solutions with cloud-based enterprise mobility management services as well as a marketplace, which provides KNOX products and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) apps. With greater security and improved usability, Samsung KNOX provides an evolving platform for today's dynamic enterprise mobility requirements. It provides for two personas – Work and Personal that are completely independent of each other and allows enterprises to have complete control of enterprise data on the work persona.

Samsung KNOX meets the needs of the most demanding enterprise business environments by offering comprehensive protection against malware attacks and hacking with its multi-layered security model and industry-leading device management capabilities. Samsung is able to achieve this by completely revamping the Android stack right from the hardware layer.

Enhanced Security is provided throughout the security chain within the platform layers. It delivers the security needed for the enterprise Android devices from the hardware to the application level. The multi-faceted security is rooted in the tamper-resistant device hardware through the Linux kernel and Android operating system. The result of this is that this solution is strong enough to run even government networks.

Galaxy devices with KNOX embedded have received Common Criteria (CC) certification, as officially documented by Gossamer Labs of Catonsville, MD. The common criteria is the international “gold standard” for secure and trusted systems, specifically to ensure that they satisfy the predefined set of security requirements designed for enterprises. Samsung KNOX confers enhanced security upon mobile devices, helping enterprises protect mobile access to high-value information assets.

The Samsung KNOX-enabled devices have also been approved by the US Department of Defense for use in DOD networks. KNOX is the first Android platform to achieve this significant milestone on the Android platform.

In addition to the core features of KNOX, Samsung has also announced new cloud-based services, KNOX EMM and KNOX Marketplace, broadening the KNOX customer base by catering specifically to SMBs.
 
Conclusion
Whether you are planning to empower your sales force with mobile-based CRM, or enhancing employee’s productivity with internal apps on the mobile, providing your executive team with business analytics that needs to be delivered in the most secure way on an Android platform, then Samsung KNOX is the only solution available in the market today. Samsung KNOX provides the best-in-class Android security that is compatible with most leading MDM solutions or on its own through Samsung KNOX EMM – the free cloud-based MDM solution for KNOX-enabled Samsung Devices.