Amazon Technology partner Oxygen Cloud Incorporated offers us a solution to enable BYOD technologies within our Enterprise, but does it provide the flexibility needed to be productive with our mobile devices? This article discusses my thoughts on this.

Corporate risk management departments attempt to secure personal mobile devices by enforcing security policies and/or through ActiveSync. When an employee connects to their corporate Exchange account using their smartphone’s default mail client, Microsoft Exchange is automatically added as an administrator on the device. This allows the Exchange server administrator the ability to remotely wipe the device in the event it is reported stolen or the employee leaves the company.

However, it is possible for employees to install third-party email clients that allow connection via ActiveSync without authorizing Exchange as a device administrator. Touchdown for Exchange even permits users to disable the ability of ActiveSync to perform a remote wipe. It is not hard to comprehend the risks this creates to a corporation. With attachments downloaded to mobile devices, their contents are at risk of dissemination in a multitude of ways.

Does Oxygen Cloud offer a solution to this risk?

Not yet. At least not an easily viable one for Enterprise corporations. With the current offering of Oxygen Cloud, meshed with the existing IT security policies generally applied in corporate networks, I would say it is not.

Consider the employee as they use Exchange. To remain efficient IT needs to maintain the ease of use that comes with attaching documents, spreadsheets, etc. to emails while they are shared throughout the corporate network, or with peers remotely. The current end-user mentality has been part of the corporate employee since Exchange 1.0 was introduced. It is just expected to be able to attach files to emails.

Oxygen Cloud allows IT to enable the sharing of those same files, at the same time, enabling risk management to secure the content and eliminate casual dissemination of corporate data. Oxygen Cloud is essentially DropBox with the added ability of enforcing corporate Active Directory security policies on shared content. Something which DropBox currently does not offer and makes it non-compliant with IT security principles preventing DropBox from being a feasible solution for the Enterprise.

The ability to create and share data on the public cloud and securing it with Active Directory provides tremendous value to any Enterprise organization. However, to take advantage of this, employees would be required to instead provide links to resources available through Oxygen Cloud in their emails instead of attaching the actual document itself. This obviously requires IT security policies to be retooled, introduced, and then enforced. As you would expect, enforcing such policies in an Enterprise corporation would be a daunting task.

In my opinion, Oxygen Cloud offers an excellent solution to enable not only Enterprise corporations, but mid-size businesses as well, the ability to mitigate significant risk by securing shared corporate data. As well, keeping this data off of personal devices and allowing the ability to expire shared content through security policies. Although small to mid sized businesses may be able to more easily enforce security policies requiring employees to stop using attachments, larger Enterprises may face stiff confrontation from not only general end-users, but from corporate leadership, including the Executive. For this reason I do not feel Oxygen Cloud is yet ready to win over Enterprise computing.

Would I buy stocks in Oxygen Cloud Inc. if they were available? I would definitely consider it as it’s only a matter of time before transitioning solutions are developed and made available and Enterprise moves into this frontier.