Corporate iPhones coming soon?

Posted on December 12, 2007 by Martin Zagorsek

Yesterday the security software firm Astaro issued a press release announcing that their VPN solution will now support the iPhone. It doesn’t look like they had to do too much to their product (if anything) to enable this support, so I suspect other VPN providers (or at least those who support the two protocols that the iPhone does - L2TP and PPTP) will soon folow.

This should help reduce one of the most significant barriers to widespread corporate adoption of the iPhone. When it first launched, it was widely criticized for lacking many of the security features that made the Blackberry such a hit with corporations. While Apple’s stated strategy was to focus on the consumer market first, many professionals use their phones for both business and personal email and data access. Until the iPhone is supported by their employer, it’s inconvenient or impossible for them to have one.

This development also opens up possibilities beyond email. Since the iPhone has a real browser, corporate users will now be able to access company intranets, wikis, and any other web-enabled internal applications. Creating iPhone-friendly versions of the user interfaces will take some work, but consumer-facing sites like Facebook and Google have already shown us great examples of how it can be done. It’s not hard to envision companies fully embracing the iPhone as a mobile platform and using it to fully empower their mobile workers the same way laptops did in the late ’90s.

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