Editor’s Note: Welcome to our weekly Reality Check column. We’ve gathered a group of visionaries and veterans in the mobile industry to give their insights into the marketplace.
One of the biggest debates in wireless over the past decade is about who owns the customer: the mobile operator or a third party such as an over-the-top provider? What about when the user is a child or teen? Does the parent have the final say on how the device is used? And a new wrinkle in the debate is the bring-your-own-device trend, where two entities call the shots: the phone’s owner and that person’s employer.
No wonder that policy control remains a hot topic for mobile operators, enterprises, OTT providers and parents alike. Yet for all of the attention it gets, policy control is notoriously challenging to implement. One reason is that conventional policy-control solutions stop at the edge of the operator’s network. They can’t enforce policies when customers, employees or children are roaming or on Wi-Fi. The lack of Wi-Fi enforceability is a major problem because operators and employers alike are encouraging the use of Wi-Fi whenever possible.
For example, some operators now load software onto their smartphones that automatically looks for and connects to home or office wireless local area networks that the user has previously connected to. The unfortunate byproduct is that the more that people take advantage of those tools, the less control employers and operators have. In the case of an employer, Wi-Fi means that there isn’t necessarily consistency in blocking certain types of behaviors, such as accessing Facebook during business hours. Parents also can’t use operator-provided tools to control their children’s usage when they’re connected to third-party Wi-Fi, such as at a friend’s house or at the mall.
By comparison, the ideal solution gives employers, operators and parents the ability to extend policies across all networks. This persistence pays off – literally. For example, an employer now can enforce its no-Facebook policy when its road warriors and other mobile workers are connected to public hotspots. That maximizes productivity and helps the employer’s bottom line. Mobile operators, meanwhile, have a more attractive parental-control solution because they now can market its ability to enforce policies even when children’s devices are roaming or on Wi-Fi.
Another example is the growing number of primary and secondary schools worldwide that are using tablets to supplement or replace textbooks. Mobile operators’ ability to capitalize on that opportunity depends partly on their ability to comply with laws. In the United States, for instance, the Children’s Internet Protection Act requires grant winners to ensure a certain level of device security.
At school, the firewall can block access to certain sites. But once students leave, conventional policy-control solutions no longer can provide the security and privacy safeguards that CIPA requires. The ideal solution extends those safeguards wherever students connect, whether it’s at a public hotspot or their home WLAN.
One size doesn’t fit all
Conventional policy-control solutions are rigid and feature-limited. For example, they rely on URL/content filtering, which often block the root-level domain, leaving any subpages with inappropriate content easily accessible. Other shortcomings occur when explicit adult images are not screened on unblocked websites like healthcare, search engines and social media sites.
The ideal solution also should be flexible enough to enable policies to go into effect at certain times, rather than forcing them to be applied at all times. For example, the ideal solution would allow an employer with a BYOD policy to create a no-Facebook policy that goes into effect based on each employee’s shift, instead of just 8 a.m. to 5 p.m.
The ideal policy-control solution also gives operators and employers the flexibility to deploy it either entirely in the network or with a combination of a network-based component and a device-side client:
–A network-only solution can be a better fit for some BYOD environments because the enterprise’s IT department now doesn’t have to worry about finding software that’s compatible with every employee’s tablet or smartphone.
–An operator or employer might prefer a network-only solution to prevent employees and children from uninstalling it or changing its settings, two common drawbacks to policy-control solutions that rely on apps and other software.
–A network-only solution also might be attractive because it doesn’t use the tablet’s or smartphone’s processor and memory, thereby maximizing device performance. That’s particularly valuable for enterprises because BYOD or not, employee productivity isn’t undermined by sluggish devices. For both enterprises and operators, the lack of a performance hit means fewer troubleshooting calls to the help desk or customer care, respectively.
–A device-side client could be used to collect quality of service metrics and other information about the user experience, all of which is reported back to the policy-control platform. The operator or enterprise then can use this data for troubleshooting, including identifying problems before they become noticeable to users.
Policy control ultimately can be a problem or an opportunity. Historically it’s been a problem because conventional solutions lack the flexibility and granularity necessary to accommodate a wide variety of use cases. By taking a completely different approach in terms of architecture and capabilities, the ideal solution makes policy control an opportunity for enterprises, operators and parents to stay in control no matter how their devices connect.
Vaughan Emery is the founder and CEO. He works closely with technology partners to deliver the company’s mobile solutions to its customers. Throughout his career, Emery has developed key business relationships with mobile operators, phone manufacturers and technology partners within the Untied States, Asia and Europe. Previously, he founded a mobile security technology company, which developed an advanced malware security solution for mobile phones and embedded devices. He has over 20 years of leadership experience in commercial product development, technology services and business development.
