After only being released and on the market for nearly 2 months, Apple has reached yet another milestone by selling their 2 millionth iPad. This is very good news. Seeing how welcoming everybody is to the iPad surly demonstrates how ready we all are to bringing our technological lives to the next ipad trade in value level. As we all become more and more comfortable with our iPads we will also find new and improved uses for them. But are companies ready to incorporate them into their employees necessary hardware? Is the iPads usefulness in business developed enough to offset the cost of purchasing them for each employee? Most importantly, is its operating system secure?
Well rest assured that the time when businesses begin to purchase and provide their employees with iPads is getting closer. On June 1st, 2010 Equinux, a security and media software company, released Tarmac. Tarmac is an enterprise provisioning system developed for use by medium to large organizations using the Apple iPad and iPhone.
Equinux ascertains that Tarmac is “the first professional provisioning tool for the Apple platform.” Specifaclly, tarmac has been developed for secure, over the air (OTA) provisioning. Currently it supports several accessible databases and directory services such as MySQL, Open LDAP, Active Directory, and many others. Microsoft exchange is supported as well.
There is a vast number of personal options that are able to be set to limit or even enhance each users experience. Through these options it is possible to limit browsing to only secure and trusted content, encryption of communication through SSL/TLS, turn on or off the ability to view video clips, and even the ability to wipe devices from remote locations. Of course these are just a few of the options available. As with all security programs, Tarmac does utilize trusted certificates to guarantee secure communication between devices. Adinistrators can also input their own certificate authorization as well. Specific permissions are not just for everyone across the board. With this you are able to set up various user groups or departments and set varying permissions based upon what you would like each to have access to.
In order to be able to install Tarmac an Intel based Mac running Mac operating system 10.5 or newer is required. Once the software is initially installed all the users need to do is to log in to the Tarmac server through each device and start the process of authentication and OTC configuration.
If you are an administrator or an IT professional it is highly recommended that you obtain a free demo copy of this program to see for yourself how beneficial it is.