iPhone not meant for enterprises

Communications News, Feb, 2008

Since its introduction, Apple's iPhone has drawn much interest from business executives. IT operations professionals, however, have remained skeptical about providing support for the devices. According to Benjamin Gray at Forrester Research, there are a number of reasons why IT should not support the iPhone.

The iPhone "does not natively support push business e-mail or over-the-air calendar sync," Gray cites as a primary concern. "The iPhone can sync with Microsoft's Exchange and IBM's Lotus Notes over IMAP and SMTP ports, but an organization's server and security admins have to configure their infrastructure to do so or purchase a mobile gateway from Synchronica or Azaleos. Even then, the iPhone can only check for new e-mail every 15 minutes."

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A second concern is that the iPhone does not accommodate third-party applications, including those internally developed. "This is a showstopper for companies with enterprise mobility initiatives that require line-of-business applications like mobile sales force automation or an industry-specific application like mobile claims," Gray asserts.

Security is another problem, especially since encryption of data is not supported. "There is no way for a company to natively secure the data on an iPhone with file or disk encryption, which is a critical consideration now that 73 percent of client security decision makers are interested in disk or desktop encryption," Gray reports.

In addition, the single-most important feature of a mobile device-management solution, according to Forrester, is the ability to remotely lock or wipe a lost or stolen device. As Gray says, however, "The iPhone does not come with any management software, so there is no way for IT to lock a device if or when users call the help desk and explain that they left their non-password protected iPhone behind in a taxi."

Despite these negatives, Forrester still predicts that the iPhone will find its way into many enterprise environments because C-level executives are buying them and expecting support from IT. Eventually, Forrester predicts, the iPhone will filter down the corporate pyramid, and IT should have a strategy to handle these requests.