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Sophos Intros Mobile Security Management Solution for Android Devices

The growing popularity of Android (News - Alert) devices in enterprise networks has created the need for mobile device and mobile security management solutions to help manage the security threats associated with these devices in the Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) environment.

The latest mobile security management  solutions provider to offer support to Android is Sophos. The latest mobile device management (MDM) solution, Sophos Mobile Control 3.0, offers support for Samsung SAFE devices.

According to Gartner's (News - Alert) "Market Share: Mobile Phones by Region and Country, 3Q12" report, Android's smartphone sales to end users by operating systems jumped to 72.4 percent in Q3 2012. The proliferation of Android devices in enterprises has put tremendous challenge on network security because Androids are vulnerable to and targeted by malware.

"More organizations are struggling with how to implement a BYOD policy. As Android's market share continues its ascent, and threats targeting Android continue to appear, it's clear that anti-malware needs to be part of that policy," said John Shaw, vice president, product management, Sophos, in a statement.

"The latest version of Sophos Mobile Control makes it even simpler for IT teams to implement mobile device management, including built-in anti-malware, making secure BYOD possible for organizations of all sizes," Shaw added.

Sophos Mobile Control 3.0 integrates with Sophos Mobile Security 2.0 to offer enhanced protection to Android smartphones and tablets from malicious apps. Thanks to the new mobile device management solution, all apps and external media entering the enterprise network are scanned for malware. Further their findings are centrally reported and mitigation actions are automatically initiated as defined in the companies' compliance settings.

A significant enhancement to the mobile device management solutions is the Web Security for Mobile. This feature extends URL filtering capabilities to Android devices. With this, any URL a user attempts to access is first verified against SophosLabs' hosted database for reputation and malware. When malicious content or phishing sites are discovered, the user will be warned and redirected to a safe site.

The support for Samsung (News - Alert) SAFE (Samsung for Enterprises) provides extended manageability for Android devices and supports enterprise features, such as VPN, Wi-Fi and Microsoft Exchange configuration, for all Samsung SAFE devices.

Sophos now offers Sophos Mobile Control as a per-user based license. This is important because the number of devices being used by each employee can fluctuate throughout the year. With a per-user based license model, Sophos simplifies license management. When deployed as part of Sophos' EndUser Protection license, Sophos Mobile Control provides security for all devices on the network in a single per-user license for mobile and endpoint protection.