Mobile Means Business

PGP and Research In Motion will take the wraps off the PGP Support Package for BlackBerry, a jointly developed product that allows for automatic encryption and decryption of e-mail on BlackBerry handsets.

Andrew Krcik, vice president of marketing at PGP, Palo Alto, Calif., said that although a high level of security is already built into the BlackBerry device and BlackBerry Enterprise Server, as well as the connection between them, there was no way to read and create PGP-encrypted e-mail directly on the handheld device.

“In addition to the inherent security you get with BlackBerry, the support package now extends that to true encryption and digital signature security for e-mail messages, all the way to the handheld,” said Krcik.

Also at the show, Seattle-based SSL VPN vendor Aventail will unveil a secure mobile access offering for PDAs and smartphones. Aventail Mobile offers users two options: a Web portal that allows access to Web-based applications from any mobile device, and a client that can be provisioned to Windows Mobile-based PDAs to allow secure client server access to those devices.

According to Harvey Storms, director of channel marketing, Aventail Mobile will appeal mainly to larger customers, for whom a centralized policy governing the number of mobile users, the type of devices they&re using, and what parts of the corporate network they are allowed to access is key to preserving security across the enterprise.

Managing smartphone and PDA access to networks is both a security and a disaster-recovery issue, said George Usi, president of Sacramento Technology Group, an Aventail partner in Sacramento, Calif. “Customers we work with are doing billions of dollars in transactions across mobile networks,” Usi said. “We are getting to a situation where mobile devices are becoming too prevalent to ignore.”

In addition, mobile security vendor BlueSocket, Burlington, Mass., will introduce Enhanced Guest Services, a traffic flow management offering aimed at facilitating the process of providing guest access to corporate networks. It is specifically designed for locations where receptionists are tasked with providing guests with secure, policy-controlled WLAN access, said Dave Danielson, vice president of marketing at BlueSocket.

Wireless technology vendor Xirrus, Westlake Village, Calif., meanwhile, is set to unveil a partnership with Austin, Texas-based Wireless Valley, which makes wireless network design and management software.

Wireless Valley&s software takes into account office environmental factors along with the number of users and types of applications the enterprise WLAN processes. John DiGiovanni, director of marketing at Xirrus, said the companies have worked together to boost the software&s ability to handle the increased throughput and wide coverage area of Xirrus& enterprise WLAN products.

“This partnership will allow our channel partners to get visual indication of the coverage patterns that will be created by our products, which will speed the design process for deploying their enterprise WLAN infrastructure,” DiGiovanni said.