SoftBank has partnered with Armor5 to bake the company’s mobile cloud security service into its enterprise offering.
Armor5’s Zero-Touch allows enterprise users to securely access third-party cloud applications like Google Apps and Salesforce while also securing enterprise apps and intranet resources.
Armor5 CEO Suresh Balasubramanian said that the SoftBank partnership means that Zero-Touch will be rolled out to SoftBank’s regional carriers throughout the Asia-Pacific area and will eventually make its way to the U.S. on Sprint. But Armor5 is currently working on partnering up with other U.S. service providers.
Balasubramanian explained Zero-Touch’s promise of “last-mile security,” saying for as much policy enforcement that can be down within the firewall and as much encryption that many cloud services offer, there is still difficulty in securing the mobile device to cloud traffic. He said enterprises have to jump through hoops to force that traffic through the firewall perimeter in order to enforce policies en route to the cloud.
“It’s a little bass ackwards if you think about it because the whole point about cloud is liberating so that you’re not chained to your desk,” Balasubramanian said.
Balasubramanian said Zero-Touch works through a mobile device’s browser, minimizing the amount of apps that have to be deployed on a device and servers that need to be deployed on premise. That could ease not only effort required of enterprise IT but also the requisite invasiveness associated with some BYOD solutions.
