IonGrid just launched Nexus Enterprise, a solution that securely streams documents from an Enterprise server to an iPad, and it does so while preserving the original rendering of the document (it’s not as common as you’d think). While this may seem like a simple endeavor from the outside, IT departments are having a tough time adapting to the Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) trend: Employees want to use their own equipment, and end-up putting confidential files on non-secure (or less-secure ) consumer-level web sharing services. You can imagine what the implications can be for a publicly-traded company…Nexus Enterprise has a component that integrates with the existing file storage infrastructure (mainly powered by Microsoft Active Directory). This allows the customer to deploy the service without having to move files to another storage pool, and that’s a big deal.
From there, Nexus Enterprise has a information policy module that controls whether a document should be visible from, or send to a device, depending on a number of parameters (user permission, geo-location…)
Finally, when the document arrives to the tablet, it is kept in a secure form (it’s vector-based version of the content ) which is never accessible from outside the IonGrid iPad application. Depending on the information policy, it is possible to allow or block copy/paste as well. As a cherry on the cake, the rendering of the document is faithful to the original. That’s never a guarantee with mobile apps.
IonGrid‘s solution appears very promising because it serves and aligns the interest of everyone involved: end-users have access to their document within a simple and intuitive interface and IT managers can deploy a secure solution that fits into the existing infrastructure. Note that at this point, IonGrid supports mainly Microsoft office documents, Adobe PDF and image files. If you’re not a Fortune 500 company, IonGrid already has an affordable solution for small businesses and for personal use that you can download.