The Challenges of Web Content Filtering for iPads
Following the announcement last week of the iPad 3, there’s been renewed discussion around the challenges for organisations in managing tablet devices. Many organisations are replacing laptops with tablets during hardware refresh cycles, some are deploying tablets in addition to laptops and others are giving users a choice of their preferred device. Then there’s the challenge of user owned devices or BYOD (yet another acronym – Bring Your Own Device). Again some organisations are taking a very proactive approach and encouraging users to bring their own device, with some forward thinking companies even giving users an allowance to buy a device. Other organisations are taking the opposite approach and have an outright ban on BYOD.
What this means for IT is a rapid move from a heterogeneous environment to a complex multi-device and operating system environment. And as often is the case, in the rush to get on board the latest technology wave, security gets pushed down the list of priorities. Many organisations have had large scale rollouts then someone has asked the question – what about security? (often after a tablet device is lost or stolen).
Unfortunately, there’s no single approach that can be taken with securing tablets. It depends on what your objective is, your network configuration and how the tablets will be deployed or who owns the devices.
Web content filtering is a critical part of securing tablets and ensuring that users can’t get open access to the Web. We have created a useful Product Note that provides information about the different approaches you can use to filter iPads. We hope you find this useful, but please contact us if you have any questions on Web filtering for iPads.
