I've been involved in several enterprise setups now and we've yet to run into any requirement we couldn't completely meet.
I don't know enough about RIM's security, so I can't compare them, but I will say that we've always managed to completely satisfy the security concerns of the IT departments we've worked with.
Anyway, do you know of any specific issues? I'm genuinely interested. Is it possible that your associates aren't fully informed?
I can ask, if you would like. So you can understand where that's coming from. There are several who've all said the same things, and they don't even know each other.
I'm not the network IT guy. I'm good enough to configure my home networks etc. to a level that is probably above 95% of the networks you see in most homes...but from an enterprise standard, I'm not "the guy"
I'll clarify a statement I made in my last post.
"I 100% agree with you on several of your points here. Regardless of whether they market themselves as suited for the space or not, <b>based on what I've been advised on the people I depend on to educate me on these matters</b>, neither iOS or Android are really suitable for corporate environments. RiM's products are...but they're having major problems with deployment at the moment."
Now, if Apple allows software firewall installation, a BES style e-mail environment including encryption of emails to and from the server, the ability to silo personal information and contacts added to the phone from business contacts etc., as well as the ability to remotely wipe all business related information without affecting personal information (or vice versa), force strong passwords as opposed to 4-digit unlock, then it would allay some of my personal concerns. But these are my personal concerns....not necessarily espoused by the network admins I tend to consult with.
I know that the iPhone can *support* strong passwords. But I find by default most people go for simple ones.....and with 4 digits, you end up with 1,2,3,4 or 4,3,2,1 etc. Similarly, in companies I've been with in the past, our network admins played an active role trying to break employee passwords any place they were used, with employees being instructed to change passwords when they were broken. This was done on a monthly basis, with monthly enforced password changes etc. As an employee at those times, it was a pain in the butt. I hated it, as several times I forget my strong passwords. But as an employer, yes, I'd expect that level of control.
I did ask one of the guys about it, and he commented about level of control...that it's more granular on Blackberry. He can control pretty much every aspect of the BB (as it should be with a work device). Wiping and enforcing passwords, allowing/disallowing OS version updating by the user, whitelist and blacklist apps, put a certificate on the BB to allow it to connect to a secured wireless network that requires the certificate to allow devices on it, prevent the device from connecting to unapproved wireless networks (ie. a Starbucks), and that the encryption protocols are far stronger, and can't easily be exploited (he claims iPhone encryption can be broken pretty easily). He also referred to "Balance" (which I refer to above), where personal and business information can be stored and treated separately on the same device. You can even do things like prevent business information from being accessed outside of preset hours.....ie. if you have an employee who's supposed to be on leave for a month, you can remotely turn off access to business contacts etc. without taking away his ability to use the phone for personal use.
Those are some of the things he pointed out.
From a business standpoint, I almost prefer the Playbook over an iPad 2....one of the nice features, which, from a consumer perspective has been displayed as a negative is the docking feature....basically, where access to e-mail, calendar etc. is pulled from the tethered Blackberry instead of being native on the tablet. So you can share a tablet among staff who "sign it out", without one person getting access to information they shouldn't have (ie. another person's e-mail). That's a powerful feature.
As someone who's done deployments of iPhones before, can you confirm whether or not a company can build custom apps for the iPhone that can be deployed to that company's iPhones, without having to pass through the Apple vetting process for the App Store? I'm not stating this as something that can or cannot be done with the iPhone. I'm asking if you know the answer, as I personally don't know.
On a personal level as a user, my non-security concerns tend to be related to:
E-mail
Going from Blackberry to iPhone has felt like a giant step down in terms of e-mail capabilities....I'm not talking security...just usability.
On my Blackberry, if I get an e-mail delivered to me (which happened much quicker/more reliably than on my iPhone), once I've read it and/or replied to it, I had the choice to delete it from my Blackberry, or delete it both from my Blackberry and from the server at the click of a button. I can't seem to do that on iPhone. If I delete an e-mail, it's gone from the server as well.
On my Blackberry, search worked very well. On my iPhone, I can send an e-mail yesterday, and put in keywords from that e-mail into a search I conduct today, and it *won't* find the e-mail....even if I tell it to look on the server also. To me, as a user, this is a nonstarter. Now, maybe there's a way to get this working better, but no iPhone user I've talked to knows a way to do it. They just either say "well, you're not using your phone right", and when I ask them to show me how to use it right, they try it, find they can't do it either, then say "well I don't need that". Which is all great and all, but *I* need that.
Now, there's a Google Apps app that I've downloaded, and *it* can do what I need.....but it's way slower than the default mail interface and more of a pain to navigate.
Again, this is from a user's perspective. As I understand it, iPad has the same characteristics. My Transformer can't do the whole "delete from e-mail or delete from server" thing, but the search is traditional Google search, works very well, and finds whatever I need, even if the e-mail is 18 months old.
If I create an event on my calendar on my desktop, it gets pushed to my iPhone. Which is obviously important. But if I'm at a client's office, and I make a meeting with them on the spot, and book it on my iPhone calendar, it *doesn't* push over to my Google calendar. This is not the case with my Transformer or Blackberry. Whether I book on my mobile device or desktop, all events appear everywhere.
Again, I've been told by the Apple people I've talked with that I'm not using my phone correctly. When they try to show me how to use it correctly, so this doesn't happen, they're unable to....and they say they don't need that feature. Again, I do. This particular issue has led to double booked/missed meetings, before I realized what was going on. Particularly if I have been on the road for a whole day with meetings stacked one after another. If I'm in 4 meetings in a row, with driving time between each, and in the first meeting I book something in my calendar with client#1, then go to 3 more meetings, by the time I get back to the office, I don't always remember to go to my desktop and set the meeting there. Which, a few days later, if I'm sitting at my desk when a 5th client asks for a meeting, can lead to accidental double bookings.
That's either a critical flaw in the usability of their system, from my business needs perspective, or an issue with their phones/OS not being easy enough to configure, as without doing anything special, this has not occurred with either Blackberry or Android. Maybe it's a permissions issue with how Google calendar talks to iOS or something....I'm not sure. All I know is that I didn't have to do anything special with Blackberry or Android to get them to talk to Google Calendar.
The final problem I have is how contact backups are done. After going through the default wizards with iOS, I have found that if I make a change to a contact directly on my handset, and later sync, and my backed up copy has older information on it, the older information actually replaces my corrected information on the phone. I didn't even realize this was going on until after several instances of finding out of date contact information when I tried reaching clients.....finding out that I was using old numbers that couldn't reach them, even after updating them on my phone several times. Again, I was told that I'm not using the phone correctly...but nobody could advise me on how to prevent this problem from happening again. Maybe it's a setting in iTunes or something.....I'm honestly not sure.
Those are three personal findings.....they may seem minor, but as someone on the go, I find them important.
By and large, with iOS 5, Apple resolved several of my other frustrations with using my phone for work. Plus, several hundred posts ago, someone on EN World posted several tips that helped me get around some of the other concerns I had at the time. The three I outlined above are the main usability issues I still have.
Banshee
