iPads storm the enterprise | Tablets | iOS Central | Macworld: Klatt is at the leading edge of a growing wave of enterprise customers who are adopting the iPad for business use. “Enterprise CIOs are adding iPad to their approved device list at an amazing rate,” Apple CFO Peter Oppenheimer said recently. “Today, over 80 percent of the Fortune 100 are already deploying or piloting iPad, up from 65 percent in the September quarter. Some recent examples include JPMorgan Chase, Cardinal Health, Wells Fargo, Archer Daniels Midland, Sears Holdings and DuPont.”
A major reason that iPads are being accepted in the enterprise is that Apple significantly upgraded its iOS operating system last summer to include a number of enterprise-friendly security features.
“These include application-level encryption,” says Andrew Jaquith, CTO at Perimeter E-Security and former lead security analyst at Forrester Research. “This encrypts the content of each application’s data with a unique key, separating out each application’s data on the device.”
Encryption is built into the hardware, making it fast—and also making it easy for enterprises to wipe the device if it’s lost or stolen. “In a tenth of a second,” Jaquith says.
In addition, iOS 4 allows enterprises to impose security policies on their mobile devices. Policies can be imposed on all company-owned iPads and iPhones, or added to personal devices owned by employees.