Salesforce.com Mobile App Developers Gain Security Tools

Good Technology has integrated its Dynamics Secure Mobility Platform with Salesforce.com's Mobile SDK to help developers build mobile applications that are more secure and easily managed.

The growing popularity of smartphones and tablets combined with the BYOD (bring-your-own-device) trend presents several challenges to IT departments, including developing mobile applications and then efficiently managing and protecting them. Salesforce.com's Mobile SDK (software development kit) helps with the former and Good's Secure Mobility Platform offers the latter.

The goal with the integration is to make it easier for Salesforce.com developers to build apps compatible with Good's containerization technology, which offers features such as app-level encryption as well as compliance and jailbreak detection. Enterprises can also put in place data loss prevention and automated actions that lock and wipe applications without impacting a user's device or personal data, according to Good.

The Mobile SDK, which is available for Android and iOS, is a key part of Salesforce.com's accelerating mobile push. It lets developers choose between building applications directly for Apple and Google's OSes, web applications or so-called hydrid applications -- which make it possible to embed HTML5 apps inside a native container.

Recently, Salesforce.com announced version 2.0 of the SDK, which added the SmartSync data framework allowing developers to create applications that work with data both off and online.

Good isn't the only mobile management tool vendor that's working with Salesforce. On Tuesday, competitor MobileIron announced Anyware. The hosted enterprise mobility management service lets administrators distribute mobile apps to employees as well as manage their devices from the Salesforce administration console, MobileIron said.

Send news tips and comments to mikael_ricknas@idg.com