AT&T to offer ‘toggle’ service

One of the big challenges facing companies that agree to allow employees to bring their own smart phones and other consumer devices like PC tablets to work, is that it can be difficult to separate open ‘personal’ usage from more secure ‘business’ usage.

AT&T, the second-largest US mobile phone network operator by subscriber numbers, is seeking to address this issue with AT&T Toggle, a downloadable application and service that will be available by year end and allow users to create two separate and distinct identities on a smartphone or tablet.

“Our customers tell us they want to allow people to use their own devices,” says Chris Hill, AT&T’s vice president of advanced mobility solutions. “People want to use their own smartphones and tablets for work, but that practice can create major headaches for businesses’ IT departments.”

AT&T’s figures show that 65 per cent of its US business subscribers are already using smartphones and that tablet sales to business customers have grown sixfold in the enterprise environment since December 2010.

According to Forrester Research, nearly 60 per cent of companies now allow employees to use personal device for work but many corporate IT departments have outstanding concerns about the security of privately owned devices and the liability should the device be lost or stolen.

Rather than forcing employees to carry multiple devices for personal and corporate usage, Toggle will enable users to create a personal account on their device that allows them to freely browse the internet, send SMS messages to friends and consume multimedia content including music and videos.

A second, more secure account that can be managed by a company’s IT department will enable users to run company business apps and send and receive company documents. Companies signing up for the service will be able to selectively allow employees with access to corporate data depending on their responsibilities. They will also be able to add, update or delete business applications on their employees’ personal devices and remotely wipe corporate information on the device if it is lost or stolen.

While some of these features are already available through other services and software apps – for example Good Technology enables companies to secure and remotely manage Android-based handsets – AT&T Toggle will be the first fully integrated service offered by a major US wireless telecommunications operator.

Initially AT&T will roll out a version of the carrier-agnostic service that runs on Google Android 2.2-based devices, but it is promising support for other operating systems early next year and plans to add other features such as separate data billing for personal and business consumption.

The availability of applications like AT&T Toggle and virtualisation technology is likely to accelerate the trend towards consumerisation of corporate IT and an associated move towards ‘bring-your-own-device’ which has gathered pace with the growing popularity of both the iPhone and iPad.

Employees benefit because they are no longer required to choose from an often limited list of approved company devices, while businesses like it because they no longer have to bear the cost of providing their employees with mobile devices.

It could also further accelerate the development of mobile enterprise applications. Today, more than 18,000 AT&T business customers have adopted mobile applications, up nearly 400 per cent since the end of the first quarter.