Smartphone security and backup: a great VAS opportunity

Stuart Corner
Wednesday, 10 August 2011 09:25

Opinion and Analysis

There is enormous potential for mobile operators to offer consumers security and management services for their smartphones, and a service launched by KDDI America suggests an intriguing possibility.

We all know that our smartphone are not secure. There have been numerous stories about vulnerabilities. Yet more and more of us are embedding smartphones deeply into our daily lives, using them for our online banking, keeping lots of valuable personal information on them: contacts, photos; and creating a big headache for our employers' IT departments by wanting to integrate them into our work environment

Fortunately technologies are available to protect smartphones from malware and hacking, and to provide backup for valuable data. For mobile operators the provision of such services represents an attractive opportunity to add value and garner additional revenues over and above the provision of connectivity and, more importantly can make customers very 'sticky' indeed.

So it can only be a matter of time before we see something offered to consumers from one or more of the Australia's three mobile network operators. Optus has dipped its toe in the water with its Smart Safe service, developed and delivered in partnership with F-Secure and offered free of charge.

Optus' first foray into smart phone security
Optus Smart Safe enables customers to back up, and store content from their mobile handset or PC/laptop and access it via the web. The service comes with 500MB of free storage, which Optus said at the announcement "may be withdrawn at any time." 10GB of additional storage costs $5.99 per month and 300GB $14.99 per month.

Telstra has gone much further than this, but only to enterprise customers. Earlier this month it launched a comprehensive service allowing organisations to manage and secure their fleets of smartphones via a web portal. The service allows an administrator, to download client software onto the mobile device. This works with software in the cloud to provide a wide range of management and security functions. At present, Telstra says, the service covers Apple, Android, Windows Phone 6.5 and Symbian operating systems, but not tablets.

CONTINUED