AirWatch Secures Mac OS X Lion, iOS in Tandem

AirWatch, known as a security software provider for mobile devices, announced that it now also supports computers running Mac OS X Lion.

The idea behind AirWatch is to implement consistent policies and profiles for iOS and Mac OS X devices that are deployed throughout an organization.

"This is a natural progression for AirWatch and our customers who have already successfully adopted a more flexible approach to IT and devices", said John Marshall, CEO at AirWatch. "It opens a new opportunity for employee choice/BYOD programs, allowing organizations to attract and retain a new generation of technology and productivity savvy talent to their companies." Marshall said that AirWatch will introduce parallel iOS/Mac OS X support with the upcoming release of Mac OS X 10.8. The company intends to follow Apple's platform path with security software solutions in the future.

The "initial" release for OS X is promised to support passcode and policy settings, email settings, Wi-Fi and VPN configurations, LDAP, calendaring extensions to WebDAV (CalDAV), contact extensions to WebDAV (CardDAV), webclips, certificates and simple certificate enrollment protocol (SCEP), as well as custom profiles.

AirWatch also offers mobile security solutions for Android, Symbian, Blackberry, as well as Windows Mobile/Phone. Cloud-service pricing starts at $4 per month per device with an activation and hardware fee of $5,000. On-site service pricing starts at $50 per device.