OREANDA-NEWS. September 17, 2012. Control over mobile devices is an essential element of corporate security, and it is best implemented centrally, so there is no need to install and set up security software on each individual smartphone or tablet PC. A new technology from Kaspersky Lab makes this possible by allowing for remote installation and set-up on mobile devices. Patent number 8,250,540 covering this technology has been granted to Kaspersky Lab by the US Patent Office.

Both corporate devices and employees' personal smartphones and tablets can be used to access sensitive business data. According to a study conducted by O+K Research in May 2012, more than a third of users do not see any difference between personal and corporate devices and use them both for business and personal needs. Although companies and staff can both benefit from using personal devices for work purposes, the practice poses a serious security threat – device infection, loss or theft could result in confidential data breaches.

The new technology is a part of the Kaspersky Security Center solution, designed for centralized management of corporate IT infrastructure security. An administrator can remotely install security software (such as Kaspersky Endpoint Security for Smartphone) on mobile devices and set rules for their use. Security settings can be either standard for all devices or varied for specific groups of users.

This new technology makes the addition of new devices to the corporate IT infrastructure fast and easy. An administrator simply has to send an installation package to a mobile device and give the command to unpack; after the package is deployed, the security solution automatically connects to the administration server and loads the security settings. Later, those settings can be modified to grant more privileges to a mobile user or, conversely, to impose specific restrictions.

The patent covering this remote security deployment method for mobile applications is the 57th patent granted to Kaspersky Lab in the US. The total number of patents granted to Kaspersky Lab in the US, Russia, China and Europe now stands at 120.