Improving Organizational Collaboration While Enhancing Mobile Security Protection

On June 24, IBM and Box announced a strategic partnership designed to accelerate secure sharing, collaboration and analytics on mobile devices.

While both companies have significant expertise in enabling smartphones and tablets with business applications and tools, the partnership enhances existing market solutions such as:

• Box’s cloud-based secure content management and collaboration platform and applications that offer employees a familiar user interface (UI);
• Specialized consulting offerings from IBM that facilitate back-end support integration to existing file shares and drives;
• Global Services and Box Consulting for rapid deployment across iOS, Android and Windows devices;
• IBM’s Enterprise Content Management (ECM), Case Management, Security, Social Collaboration and Analytics solutions.

The security aspects of the partnership can be leveraged by your organization, and with these new capabilities, you can further improve your mobile security protection.

Five Key Changes to Secure Mobile Collaboration

As detailed in our recent press release, the partnership permits your organization to expand its knowledge of current security risks and vulnerabilities, improve data protection and bolster mobile security protection by offering the following:

• Mobile enablement and policy controls with IBM MaaS 360 (previously MobileFirst Protect)
• Detection, analysis and remediation of enterprise malware on mobile devices via IBM MaaS360 Mobile Threat Management;
• Management of customer-owned encryption keys with Box Enterprise Key Management;
• Single sign-on and identity management capabilities with IBM Security Access Manager;
• Threat detection, event reporting and anomaly detection with IBM QRadar and X-Force.

IBM’s Security portfolio will be incorporated into the Box Trust program, so clients can benefit from preintegrated solutions without compromising ease of use. In addition, support between IBM MaaS360 Enterprise Mobility Management (EMM) and Box’s content management capabilities will be even stronger and more responsive.

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What Does This Mean to Me?

Mobile security continues to be an area where some organizations confess that they “don’t know what they don’t know.” To better understand how things will work on the ground (or in the air, at home or anywhere else), these scenarios outline our in-market solutions for secure enterprise collaboration.

• Consolidated View of Content Repositories: IBM MaaS360 currently leverages Box’s APIs to deliver Box documents through an IBM MaaS360 container. This permits end-users to have a single consolidated view of the content repositories they need to access for work on their mobile devices. Your IT administrators can enforce policies to protect privileged data, including user authentication, copy/paste restrictions and open-in to only authorized applications. As a result, your repositories are easier for IT teams to manage, and your end user experience is improved significantly. Practically, this means that your security administrators can restrict users from cutting and pasting draft press release content about your upcoming blockbuster product release or permit them to automatically delete the announcement after it’s been read.
• Restricting Box to Company-Approved Mobile Devices: Through the Box for EMM application, the use of Box can be restricted to company-approved mobile devices managed and secured by MaaS360. This permits end users to have the exact same experience as in the native Box application but enables IT administrators to provision the Box application and control access to content based on users’ roles or the device’s security posture. From a practical perspective, this means that employees can’t save sensitive information to Box unless the device is being managed by the company’s mobile management system.

How Do I Learn More?

To learn more about this exciting offering, check out our partnership Web page.