The Enterprise Ready iPhone

Yesterday Apple announced the fourth release of the iPhone OS. There are a lot of changes to the platform but some of the less-discussed improvements are ones which bring ‘enterprise-ready’ features to the iPhone. These features really open up the potential for using iPhone and iPad devices securely in a business context.

With iPhone OS 4, iPhone and iPad now support:

• SSL VPN Support
• Multiple MS Exchange Accounts
• Mobile Device Management – Remotely configure, update and wipe devices
• Data Encryption
• In-House App Distribution – Distribute and update your enterprise apps to company devices wirelessly

All of these are important features for most medium and large businesses, but being able to remotely update and sync your company iPhones and iPads is a real clincher. The ability for an enterprise to write and deploy its own apps (not distributed with the App Store) to staff devices wirelessly over WiFi or 3G, is the only reliable way of making sure all your devices are up to date: waiting for users to sync with iTunes mean it could takes weeks for all devices to get an update.

Add the ability to encrypt user data, access your network securely though a VPN and remotely manage and wipe devices, and you’ve got a pretty good case for building mobile apps which help you to do business, and that don’t give the Sys Admins a security and management headache.

I’ve only had a cursory look over the new SDK but the thing which stands out is that it really feels like a mature platform: there aren’t as many missing or restricted APIs and many of them have been massively expanded. This release will give rise to a whole host of apps just not possible before.

I can’t wait to take a closer look at the SDK in the next couple of days!