Mobile Platform Ratings

Experts rate the top 4 mobile operating systems

Based on expert analysis, there’s not a single consumer mobile operating system that offers all of the security and management capabilities that enterprises need—but they are getting better.

To give you a complete picture of current mobile OS security holes and management challenges, industry analysts teamed up with Trend Micro’s CTO Raimund Genes and other security experts. Together they rated the top four platforms based on 60 security and management criteria.

Their in-depth report, Enterprise Readiness of Consumer Mobile Platforms, compares the most widely-used versions of BlackBerry OS, Apple iOS, Windows Phone, and Google Android.

“The feature sets that IT managers should give high consideration to include: security certifications, device firewall, and support for virtualization, which are largely still missing.”
 

• BlackBerry OS
  “…their true use and enforcement relies on a complex, back-end infrastructure that not all organizations may have in place or want to maintain.”


• Apple iOS
  “…the IT department can configure certain things, but only once the user has provided certain permissions to the IT administrator.”


• Google Android
  “Security patches are provided to customers by individual carriers or handset manufacturers. There is an unacceptable delay in this process...”


• Microsoft Windows Phone
  “The system is too new to show a reasonable track record for enterprise adoption, and corporate policies should take this reality into consideration…”

Enterprise Readiness of Consumer Mobile Platforms also includes a guide for defining mobile roles and postures and reveals the security holes and management challenges that every IT manager needs to consider.