3LM, recently acquired by Motorola, develop device management and secure remote connectivity VPN solutions for the Android platform: the three laws of mobility being:

• Protect your user - a mobile device may not harm its user or, through inaction, allow its user to come to harm through malicious code or content
• Protect yourself - a mobile device must protect itself and the integrity of its data and secured communications
• Obey - a mobile device must let the user use the device freely, as long as such usage does not conflict with the First or Second Law

A number of vendors already offer solutions for applying security policies to Android Smartphones (use of a password, for example) such as Soti's MobiControl and Syabse Afaria. Where 3LM differs is the ability to provide not only policy enforcement and remote application installation on client devices, but also a VPN solution for Android providing secure remote connectivity to internal corporate resources, such as intranets and line of business (LOB) applications, including Microsoft Exchange - something that the stock Android operating system does not handle very well.

The solution is a client-server model, requiring that an Internet-facing device management and remote access server be deployed, and also that a client package be present on the Android Smartphone installed at the ROM level (which both Motorola and HTC will be doing on all handsets in the future), however a hosted model is also going to be available.

Hardware Control

The device management options available in the 3LM solution include:

• Set policies to enable and disable Bluetooth, Camera, NFC, WiFi, SD card and microphone
• Whitelist and blacklist applications that can run on the device
• Disable preinstalled applications
• Push and remove applications from devices
• Control application-level access to system resources and hardware

Security

The security features offered by the solution include:

• Enforce use of strong passwords on devices
• On-device and SD card encryption
• Offer applications secure encrypted transport to enterprise back-ends, including Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync
• Remote device lock and remote device wipe

The 3LM solution also offers location tracking and location history reporting as well as hardware usage policies based on location (Geofencing). The solution can also be integrated with Microsoft Active Directory groups for ease of user management and profile assignment.

Only devices running Android 2.3 or later are supported.

Watch this space for more detailed information as it becomes available.