Today’s mobile-heavy business environment has created an interesting challenge for enterprise security. While there’s always been something of a struggle between IT and users when it comes to security vs. user expectations, the advent of BYOD practices and self-serve cloud solutions has brought that struggle to the forefront. The challenge that CIOs and IT professionals today face is finding the correct balance between employee empowerment and protecting the company’s data.

One way that storage providers have been encouraging enterprise use is to offer APIs and connectors that allow third parties to access and manipulate their cloud storage systems. In other cases, storage providers have directly joined forces with a variety of technological solutions providers.

It’s the latter that has brought MobileIron and BOX together. MobileIron created an ecosystem allowing third parties to interact with its mobile device management solutions, known as AppConnect. Box has now joined that ecosystem, and the result is promising for the enterprise.

For both administrators and users

AppConnect is designed to help bring a close to the eternal battle between administrator concerns and user expectations. Finding the right balance between employee empowerment and protection of proprietary information is what this partnership is all about.

Here are some of the ways that BOX for MobileIron can help to tighten integration and increase functionality across the enterprise:

• Users log in to their BOX space via Active Directory credentials.

• Whitelisting of certain third-party apps to make sure that Box content can only be opened in applications that are AppConnect enabled.

• Limiting the ability of Box users to cut, copy and paste content from their Box account to meet various security policies within your organization.

This is just one example of just how effective MobileIron’s AppConnect environment can be. It allows employees to use the tools that they want to use – the tools that are the driving force behind adoption of mobile technologies. It does this while providing organizations the kinds of security and regulatory capabilities that they need in order to protect their data.