Sophos to Provide BES-Like Power over Non-BB Phones

If you’ve got an employer, well first of all congratulations, who’s been hip enough to let you use a non-Blackberry device as your company phone or tablet but since you and the other brokers went on that coke and hooker binge while snapping and emailing pictures the other night which made the cover of the Post has regretted his decision, Sophos will soon empower him with the ability to “secure,” monitor, lock, wipe, force a password change, prevent use of the camera, keep you off Youtube, access your GPS – basically do everything your boss would be able to do to do with the phone as if he were holding the phone. Sophos says there’s a “consumerization gap” and they’re here to fill it.

Though your boss can already remote wipe, lock, password policies and so on if you’re connected with any of these devices to your company’s Exchange server or to Google Apps Premier, without Sophos’s help he won’t be able to fully monitor everything you do like he could with a Blackberry Enterprise Server, can’t keep you off Youtube, read your GPS coordinates or prevent you from taking pictures. Thank God for Sophos.

My advice to employers titillated by this? Give your people back their Blackberries. RIM knows how to do this right. Don’t bank on this third party software to cover your ass legally or even be effective. Rely on them if you need advice on generating hype and FUD.

Doug Simmons