In today’s workplace the capability to be mobile is important. Major companies all the way down to small businesses are trying to find ways that their employees can function outside the workplace and are always connected.

 

Fiberlink Communications announced the release of their Software as a Service (SaaS (News - Alert)) MaaS360, a cloud-based platform and portal for mobile operations management. It will provide enterprises a single platform to manage all elements of their mobile operations regardless of where the user, device or data is located or connected. According to the International Data Corporation, by 2010 over 70 percent of employees will be considered mobile.

 

“Enterprises have been trying to manage their mobile users and devices with traditional corporate network tools, using traditional user models, such as the road warrior and task worker designations,” said Christopher Clark, chief operating officer of Fiberlink. “But employees today are themselves defining a new computing model where they expect to be able to do their jobs regardless of where they are, which happens more and more to be outside the corporate network. Enterprises are facing the need to evolve from a local area network-based mindset to providing a secure mobility cloud in which applications, data, and support are available to users at all times.”
 

Using SaaS will lower costs by eliminating upfront capital investments and on-going maintenance costs of mobile infrastructure furthermore it will speed time-to-value by turning mobile deployments into cloud provided services. MaaS360 can do this by moving the IT management and control point out from behind the corporate firewall and extend the perimeter across the Internet where the majority of users are today.

 

“The initial phase of SaaS solutions was targeted at improving the delivery of business applications, such as sales force automation. What we are seeing now is the as-a-service approach can ease the burden of selecting, deploying and maintaining IT management platforms,” said Jeffrey M. Kaplan, managing director, THINKstrategies, Inc. and founder of the Software as a Service Showplace. “We believe that Mobility as a Service solutions will permit IT managers to more cost-effectively deploy and administer all forms of mobile communications, applications, and data throughout the Internet.”

 

Key Features of the MaaS360:

 

 

“The privacy of our clients’ information is imperative. At the same time, mobility is an essential part of our strategy and helps us increase productivity and achieve our goals,” said Donn Lassila, vice president, chief information officer for Davidson Companies. “To tackle the challenge of maintaining mobility while also ensuring that information is secure, we turned to the experts at Fiberlink who helped us protect information on and off the network. Fiberlink’s services allow us to continuously inspect, monitor and manage critical security services on all of our computers, while we mobilize a portion of our staff. Further, MaaS360 offers visibility into our computing environment and allows us to generate connectivity and security reports that improve compliance.”