1. The incomplete story of knox
Knox did not really take off to become a significant enterprise mobile security solution.
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Knox has been around for quite a while which is one of the prominent mobile security
solution based on android. Recently Apple has added a number of enterprise features that
are brilliantly done and looks promising for the future. But on the other end Knox was out
before Apple published their enterprise features with iOS7. Knox has been able to generate a
lot of attention for android app developers and the enterprise market. However, till date the
knox ecosystem has not really expanded on a considerable scale. There are various reasons
for it.
One of the most important factor that lead to a limited distribution of Knox is the direct
control of carriers to enable the service or not. This creates a significant threshold for both
enterprise and users to have the service at their convenience. On to is the carriers would also
determine the devices that would be allowed to run Knox. Till date only a handful of
samsung devices have been added into the list and samsung is not the only android
smartphone seller in the market. There are other seller in the market too and this creates an
asymmetry and unwillingness for corporations and service providers.
In addition to this one cannot simply employ the EAS protocol to run the show here. Knox
requires its own mobile server and that does not come for free. One has to pay for every
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2. device connected to the system. Moreover most of the MDMs have not really teamed up
with samsung which indicates a serious activity in this direction.
The problem increased since last fiscal as samsung did not register an enthusiastic growth.
While in the US it lost the race to apple this year, in countries like india, local brands along
with Sony and HTC have taken a considerable part of the market. In such a scenario, knox
cannot fill up samsung’s pocket alone. But on the other hand google can surely think of
coming up with something that takes into account a large number of android devices.
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