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How can Android Enterprise Recommended improve user privacy?

To simultaneously tackle the issues of mobile user privacy and security, IT can deploy Android Enterprise Recommended devices and partition them with a dedicated API.

As organizations deploy more and more mobile devices, they also create the potential for data loss.

In the past, many IT pros put each employee device under complete corporate management, but many users aren't fond of this approach. This approach gives IT total control over the entire device for personal and corporate apps and data, and this lack of privacy is a problem.

The best way to address users' privacy concerns while keeping corporate data secure is to deploy devices from the Android Enterprise Recommended list.

How can Android Enterprise Recommended help with privacy and security?

Google's Android Enterprise Recommended program certifies smartphone devices that fit well into Android Enterprise management practices. If an IT department uses Android Enterprise to manage these preapproved devices in a mobile fleet, it has the ability to essentially have two devices in one: a personal area that the end user completely controls and a secured, vaulted work profile that IT controls.

This management technique allows organizations to install the necessary secure mobile applications through a special provisioning feature that allows end users to access them when they use the work profile. This device partition also creates a unique identity for the work profile that is separate and distinct from the user-controlled side. The different identity helps IT protect sensitive data with a fully encrypted storage area that can't interact with personal data, bolstering user privacy without sacrificing the user experience.

Android Enterprise Recommended provides a set of enterprise-level APIs to manage all of these partitions. These management tasks that the Android Enterprise APIs can help with include zero-touch enrollment for bulk deployment, timely security patches and timely security updates. To perform them, IT will need an enterprise mobility management (EMM) or unified endpoint management (UEM) tool from vendors such as BlackBerry, Citrix, MobileIron and VMware. Google and some device OEMs also have EMM capabilities, but they are not as feature-rich as UEMs from other vendors.

Organizations should select a device from the preapproved list to ensure their devices are secure. The Android Enterprise Recommended list is even attractive to organizations with BYOD users because it includes many popular devices from leading OEMs, such as Samsung, LG, BlackBerry, Google Pixel and Huawei, from which users can choose. Organizations must specify to BYOD users which devices they can purchase to ensure access to enterprise apps, data and services.

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