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Theft, loss and damage are the most obvious, but many employees are using public wireless networks to access corporate information and protection is needed.

Freedome for Business (FFB) from F-Secure offers a single solution that provides total mobile security for businesses of all sizes. All Internet access is secured with personal VPNs and anti-malware, while its web portal allows administrators to track devices and swiftly deploy a range of security measures, including passcode enforcement, remote lock, and device wipe.

FFB uses the standard F-Secure Protection Services for Businesses web portal and from this one interface you can manage all of your servers PCs, MACs, and mobile devices. A separate tab is provided for monitoring mobile devices including their protection status, usage statistics and for despatching remote commands.

We found iPad enrolment to be simple enough and started by downloading the vendor-signed certificate request, creating an Apple push certificate. Next, we created a new mobile device in the FFB portal along with the user's email address. An email provides a link for downloading the Freedome app and as soon as it was installed, it grabbed the default mobile profile from the portal and enforced its anti-theft settings. Options are extensive: we could create profiles asking for simple passcodes of four characters or be much stricter and enforce stronger combinations.

With a strict passcode policy on our iPad, the Freedome app would not allow us to choose repeating, ascending or descending characters and insisted on an alphanumeric mix. We could request that users change their passcodes every one to six months and only allow old ones to be reused after between three to ten other combinations had been used.

The portal provides a detailed overview of all mobile devices and each is assigned a colour-coded icon showing their protection status along with details of their email address, device type, and OS version. The Protection sub-tab shows the status of anti-malware, browsing and tracking protection, along with the country where the device is currently located.

If a mobile is reported lost or stolen, the security impact can be swiftly contained. From the portal simply select the affected device and using the Anti-Theft tab to send a command to either reset its passcode, lock it, or wipe it.

The Freedome iOS app is really easy to use so training requirements are minimal. It manages all personal VPN setup and connection to an F-Secure concentrator so there's nothing users need do other than to read and accept the AUP (acceptable use policy) that it presents and allow the app to make changes.

The app presents a dashboard displaying the protection status in the centre with radiating rings showing the amount of protected traffic along with the number of blocked sites and tracking attempts. Most protection operations are completely transparent but if a user tries to visit a suspect web site then the app will block access and redirect them to a warning page.

From the FFB web portal we could view statistics for each mobile device and see the amount of protected traffic measured along with a count for blocked malware, web sites and tracking attempts. Selecting a single mobile device allowed us to check when it last connected and all this information can be exported as a CSV file.

Freedome for Business provides a complete package for mobile security which we found easy to deploy and manage. It scales across any size of business and its slick VPN services ensure that users are protected no matter where they are in the world. NC

Product: Freedome for Business
Supplier: F-Secure
Web site: www.f-secure.com
Price: 25-100 devices: £27.96 excluding VAT per license