From whitepaper:
"ThinVisor displays, at any one time, only a single Persona in the foreground of the device. All the other Personas are referred to as background Personas - Personas that continually run on the system in the background..."
I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say that hypervisors on cell phones are a bad idea. As if one list of battery sucking OS tasks was not enough - now you can have three or four!
Shema Congregation Beth ZDNet! You need to know about Cellrox, an Israeli company that has the cure for your BYOD ills. The company offers a total solution for your Android-based mobile devices that’s live, working and available to you now. They use multiple “personas” to accomplish the secure separation between corporate data and personal data. These personas are actually virtual mobile devices that run simultaneously on your host device. Their solution uses a ThinVisor.
A ThinVisor is a kernel-enabled hypervisor that runs on the host hardware that accommodates these multiple personas.
What does this technology mean for you as the end user?
It means that this technology ensures that your personal Apps and data never mixes with the data contained in the corporate persona. It means that you’ll enjoy the same performance from simultaneously running multiple personas as you do from running a single use device. It also means that the whole process is transparent to you.
What does this technology mean for you as IT support?
It means that you can remotely manage the corporate persona without physically touching the device. And, by manage, that means everything. You can enforce policies, decide what type of access you’ll allow for a persona (Shared, Exclusive, None) and determine persona switching scenarios.
If you’d like to see a live demo of how persona switching works, check out CellRox Jade in Action.
Cellrox also offers a whitepaper that describes the ThinVisor in detail.
I spoke with Cellrox CEO, Omer Eiferman, yesterday and he also told me that they are going to release a consumer persona product, now known as Amber, sometime probably next year. He didn’t have a price available yet for the Amber product. What Amber will allow you to do is to create a virtual device (persona) on your current device that can be used for guests, other members of your family or for privacy.
As I’ve said in other posts, these types of hypervisors are what will keep BYOD security concerns at bay. In the video, you can see how easily you can switch from one persona to the other. Your personal persona is totally owned by you with no restrictions and the corporate one receives its security information from the Cellrox mobile device management (MDM) software.
You can operate the Cellrox MDM from your own internal server or via a cloud-hosted service. The MDM enables IT administrators to provision, manage, update, audit and control the corporate persona on their employees’ devices.
As I’ve written many times before, this hypervisor technology is the best way to handle the BYOD dilemma. Actually, it removes the dilemma and only leaves the question of, “When will you convert to a bring your own device model?”.
After you check out the video demo and the whitepaper, talk back and tell me what you think of Cellrox’s solution.
