celebrity apprentice reports: [Infographic] What We Learned From Mobile World Congress & RSA 2012

Saturday 3 March 2012

[Infographic] What We Learned From Mobile World Congress & RSA 2012

Two conferences 6,000 miles apart this week have set the agenda in the mobile and security industries for the year ahead. Mobile World Congress in Barcelona is the most important gathering in the wireless industry all year while the RSA Conference in San Francisco is the table setter for all of the cryptographers before Black Hat hits Las Vegas in July.

MWC 2012 was a product-focused event, as most wireless conferences tend to be. We saw new devices coming from Nokia (a 41-megapixel camera on a Symbian, what?!), HTC, Huawei and ZTE. RSA was more issue focused. That makes sense since it is harder to roll out a new security product than a couple new smartphones or tablets. At the same time, there was a distinct intersection of the two conferences. See below for what we learned this week.

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Below is the second of two exclusive infographics that Juniper made for ReadWriteWeb this this on the intersection of security and mobility. You can check out the first one, setting the stage for RSA and MWC here.

One of the biggest issues when it comes to security and mobile is the notion of "mobile device management" (MDM). This is the term bandied about by enterprise IT denizens when attempting to deal with the "bring-your-own-device" (BYOD) phenomena in corporations across the world. To be completely honest, it is kind of a played out topic. Enterprises struggle with it because IT departments often move with the speed of a glacial slug. While IT departments move slow, the security vendors providing MDM solutions move fast, clamoring over each other to provide a new service that is often no different from any of their competitors. When it comes to device and security management, MDM is the Plane Jane Vanilla of mobile security.

Some of the smarter security vendors have started adding more core services to mobile security. For instance, BlackBerry has always been good at MDM as well as application and document security. Its Mobile Fusion product, scheduled for a full release in late March, brings its BlackBerry Enterprise Server functionality to other smartphone platforms and device vendors. Motorola subsidiary 3LM (Three Laws of Mobility) provides one of the most comprehensive security solutions across application, document, device, encryption, virus protection and more.

Check out the links from RSA and MWC below as well as the infographic from Juniper.

Did you attend either of these events? What were your biggest takeaways? Let us know in the comments.