Back in October, SAP partner Forescout (who provide network security solutions) announced interoperability between their CounterACT network security product and SAP Afaria. Its a great combination of technologies that help companies to accelerate the provisioning, administration and security of both corporate and personal mobile devices, apps and data. I've been working with Forescout on this technology partnership for the past few months, and wanted to share the background as well as invite you to a webinar being held on Monday Nov 18th (link below).
Industry experts agree that these two areas fit well together. In the press release by Forescout (issued on Halloween), analyst Chris Hazelton, of 451 Research was quoted as saying “We see strong synergy between network access control (NAC) and MDM in their capabilities to provide visibility into devices regardless of ownership – corporate or personal. The pairing of NAC with MDM technologies offers organizations the means to easily identify who and what type of device is connecting to the enterprise, to automatically enroll and monitor roles-based controls for any device and user and to secure the growing movement of corporate data across smartphones and tablets.”
Together, ForeScout CounterACT and SAP Afaria offer enterprises the means to:
- See and detect all unmanaged, corporate and personal mobile devices, such as iPads, iPhones and Androids and other devices attempting to connect to the corporate network via Wi-Fi or over-the-air
- Readily apply security policy based on user, role and device in order to automatically limit access, manage as guest or enroll in SAP Afaria MDM
- Trigger SAP Afaria to profile check managed devices upon network resource request to detect jail-broken, rooted and non-compliant handhelds and to restrict access until the device adheres to policy
- Fortify a range of user, device, application and data policies though network-enforced controls, such as password strength, configuration, application use, encryption and data protection
- Provide powerful compliance rules engines at the device and network level, that support on-demand and automated responses such as reconfigure, remote wipe and network reassignment
- Provide unified visibility and reporting for all mobile endpoint devices including PCs, smartphones, tablets and laptops through the ForeScout CounterACT platform
This integration is provided via the ForeScout MDM Integration Module, which is an add-on to their product. If you want to learn more about ForeScout CounterACT check out the website. For a quick summary, it is a real-time security solution that delivers visibility and automated control for all devices, users, systems and applications attempting to connect to or on an enterprise network.
To learn more about this partnership, I invite you to join our own Afaria product manager Don Coop who will join Forescout Monday November 18th at 1:00pm Eastern for a webinar entitled “Securing Successful BYOD and Enterprise Mobility”. You can register at http://www2.forescout.com/sap_afaria.
