Last week, a large financial services organization shared an enterprise mobility use case that is common across other enterprise organizations. How can we provide secure mobile access to web apps for our employees, partners and contractors.
Let’s break this down a bit. This customer has hundreds of internal web (intranet websites) and cloud (websites hosted in the cloud) apps for which they don’t have a good mobile access solution. These days employees, partners and contractors can reasonably expect to access these websites from their mobile device. There are several reasons why mobile access might not available. The most common is that the organization does not have the time, money or resources to develop native mobile apps to can access the internal web apps. An additional complication is granting mobile access through the firewall. And web apps are not optimized for mobile browser access.
Even granting access to 3rd party cloud apps like an ERP system, can be troublesome. The mobile app from the ERP vendor may not work with the organization’s SSO solution, or may offer the user experience the organization is looking for.
In summary, there are many reasons that slow down the adoption of mobile in the enterprise.
Progressive Web Apps Are Not the Right Answer
For a while, Progressive Web Apps (PWA) looked like they were the answer for mobile access to web and cloud apps in the Enterprise. In fact, PWAs were called the next big thing for the mobile web. Gartner said that they would disrupt the mobile app paradigm by bridging the web experience with native app functionality. So why it is that PWAs have not taken the Enterprise by storm?
In one word: Accessibility. Most people looking for mobile access to web apps are doing so from their own (BYOD) devices and from outside the firewall. And making mobile access easier, involves making network changes and updating security policies. Changes that require the input and approval from different departments and take time and resources to implement. As a result, it is a lot easier to tell mobile users to access the web apps from laptops using a VPN tunnel when necessary.
And even when PWAs were used, there was the issue of usability. A mobile browser lacks the persistency that comes with an app. And it is not as user friendly and as a native mobile app. For this reason, adoption, especially with the mobile native generation, is not great.
ISV Apps Don’t Solve All Use Cases Either
Most large organizations today rely on Single Sign-On to authenticate employees, contractors and even partners to cloud apps such as CRM, ERP, LMS, collaboration and more. They will use enterprise authentication solutions from Microsoft such as Active Directory, ADFS, ADAL or Azure AD. Others rely on cloud solutions from Okta, Ping and more. However, most ISV mobile apps don’t offer support for all the above mentioned SSO solutions. And as a result, employees are not allowed to use the publicly available mobile apps.
SecurePWA Offers Instant Mobile Access to Web Apps
With SecurePWA, Appdome offers Enterprises a fast and easy way to offer mobile access to web apps. And this without any mobile app development work and with support for their enterprise VPN and authentication solutions. They can create full-fledged, stand alone, progressive web apps for Android and iOS using only the existing website address of the web or cloud app. And in the same workflow they can protect the app with Appdome’s security, authentication or access features. Optionally, they can use Appdome’s no-code integration service to add 3rd party UEM/MAM and other enterprise controls. Finally, Appdome SecurePWA’s can be distributed via any public or private app store. This makers the discovery and installation for the end-users fast and easy.
SecurePWA is also a great solution for cloud apps, especially when the binaries (IPAs/APKs) for the ISV apps are unavailable.
Built for the Modern Enterprise
Organizations can create 1 or 100s of secure progressive web apps in minutes. This brings the full power of mobile access to web apps to their users instantly. SecurePWA comes with the following features:
- Android and/or iOS app from a URL
- Flexible Branding/Naming/Versioning
- SiteTRUST™ (Anti-Phishing with ATS and NSC)
- TouchID and FaceID (local authentication)
- EnterpriseID™ (Secured Credentials and Cross-App ID)
- ONEShield™ (Anti-Tampering, Anti-Debugging, Anti-Reversing)
- Unlimited users (internal use cases)
Get started with SecurePWA today. Create your appdome account and a representative will contact you to discuss your use case.
