Mocana, a provider of security solutions for embedded and mobile devices, has introduced a new appliance designed to simplify and secure enterprise mobile app deployments.
The new offering, Mocana Atlas Extended Enterprise Engine, is a purpose-built platform that the company says mitigates many of the toughest security bottlenecks found in large-scale rollouts, while significantly reducing mobile total cost of ownership (TCO).
Deployed behind the firewall, Mocana Atlas provides a platform that leverages Mocana’s Mobile App Protection solution (MAP), and dramatically increases MAP’s reach and ease-of-deployment, the company explained.
Currently in private beta, San Francisco, California-based Mocana calls describes the solution as a “drop-in appliance that makes it easy and cost-effective to securely mobilize enterprise data for any user on any device.”
For a number of reasons, security being one, enterprises have lagged far behind consumers in mobile application adoption.
“This gap between consumer and enterprise app adoption is severely limiting the value that companies could reap from leveraging higher-value enterprise apps beyond simple PIM, email and calendaring,” Mocana explained.
“Mobility has become a critical pathway to achieving competitive advantage, and if a modern enterprise doesn’t have 10 or 20 enterprise mobile apps deployed to their workforce, and another 5 or 10 apps deployed to channel partners and suppliers, it’s already behind the curve,” Kurt Stammberger, CISSP, vice president marketing at Mocana, said in a statement.
Designed to support thousands of concurrent encrypted mobile app connections, Mocana says Atlas delivers the ‘missing link’ that makes it possible for enterprises to fully mobilize their employee, intellectual assets at global scale, and at significantly lower cost than traditional approaches.
Atlas works with existing mobile device management (MDM) or mobile application management (MAM) solutions, and supports both iOS and Android.
Other features and capabilities of Mocana Atlas include:
• Can extend security policies to apps on unmanaged devices used by partners, contractors or others outside the enterprise network
• Simplifies new-user provisioning by making it easier for admins to get real X.509 digital certificates onto devices and into apps by leveraging the Certificate Authority (CA) they already have.
• Supports multi-factor authentication, and is designed to tie in to existing Microsoft Active Directory servers.
• Mocana Atlas’ location in the enterprise DMZ makes SCEP (Simple Certificate Enrollment Protocol) safer for the enterprise and ‘username-password-simple’ for end-users, according to Mocana.
• Delivers end-to-end security and new security-posture intelligence at the point of network connection
• Virtually transparent to end users, Atlas offers single sign-on across all MAP-protected apps.
Mocana Atlas is scheduled to be commercially available in Summer 2014, the company said.
“Traditional security appliances add extra layers of management controls to try and make mobility secure. Mocana Atlas takes a different approach: improving the security posture of the enterprise by making mobile apps and their communications more inherently secure. Even from jailbroken devices, MAP-secured apps connected to Mocana Atlas can complete trusted business transactions,” said Alan Panezic, vice president of products at Mocana.
Late last year, Mocana announced that it had received a strategic investment from GE Ventures. Other investors in Mocana include Shasta Ventures, Southern Cross Venture Partners, Symantec and Trident Capital.
More information on Mocana Atlas is available online.
