Q&A: How CIOs Can Benefit from Apple iOS 5, iCloud

CIO — Last week, Apple discreetly tipped its cap to businesses after unleashing iOS 5 to the general public. This latest version of the iPhone and iPad operating system is chock full of critical enterprise features that went largely unnoticed during Apple's iOS 5 launch event aimed at consumers.

Simply put, iOS 5 shows that "Apple really has been listening to businesses," says Aaron Freimark, IT director at Tekserve, a services firm helping Fortune 1000 companies adopt the iPad.

It's a good thing, too, as CIOs face a daunting challenge keeping up with iPads and iPhones infiltrating their companies. Apple recently claimed 92 percent of the Fortune 500 are testing or deploying the iPad.

CIO — Last week, Apple discreetly tipped its cap to businesses after unleashing iOS 5 to the general public. This latest version of the iPhone and iPad operating system is chock full of critical enterprise features that went largely unnoticed during Apple's iOS 5 launch event aimed at consumers.

Simply put, iOS 5 shows that "Apple really has been listening to businesses," says Aaron Freimark, IT director at Tekserve, a services firm helping Fortune 1000 companies adopt the iPad.

It's a good thing, too, as CIOs face a daunting challenge keeping up with iPads and iPhones infiltrating their companies. Apple recently claimed 92 percent of the Fortune 500 are testing or deploying the iPad.

Inside Look: The iPad Culture Shock for IT

Since Apple released iOS 5 and a new Internet storage and sharing service, called iCloud, last Wednesday, the company says more than 25 million devices now run this latest version of the operating system. More than 20 million people have signed up for iCloud.

While iOS 5's enterprise features are welcome news for CIOs, a growing iCloud consumer service poses serious corporate security risks. Just imagine sensitive corporate documents in Apple apps such as Pages, Keynote and Numbers being backed up on Apple servers and automatically shared with other iOS devices associated with the same Apple ID.

CIO.com talked with Friemark about steps CIOs can take when using iOS 5 and iCloud.

Aaron Freimark of Tekserve

What do you think of iOS 5 from an enterprise standpoint?

Freimark: The way the whole ecosystem of mobile device management [MDM] vendors works is that Apple gives basically a protocol for communicating with iPhones and iPads. Apple came out with this (enterprise) system in version 4.0 and upgraded with version 4.3. Now with iOS 5.0, there are more features, known as restrictions. They prevent iCloud document syncing, iCloud key-value syncing, iCloud backup. These individual switches can be turned on and off. Another one prevents Siri from working.

Because MDM vendors are all working off of the standard Apple spec, they tend to have a lot of overlap in their offerings. Anything that goes outside of that spec really isn't going to be interactive with that device. A lot of the vendors have upgraded in the last 24 hours [of the iOS 5 general release last week].

How can CIOs guard against the iCloud security threat?

Freimark: In the last year or two, we've seen a real maturity in the [consumer] cloud with Dropbox, Box.net and now iCloud. For consumers, there is really no downside and a huge upside in ease-of-use content storing and sharing. I personally love iCloud. The biggest pain is transferring files on and off, and you don't have to do that anymore.