Let’s assume that you are one of those enlightened enterprise mobile people that are now on board with an HTML5-based Web strategy. There are many good reasons to be on board with HTML5 when it comes to mobile-driven app deployment, and you are ready to begin putting it to work for your company and its workforce.

There is, however, one serious problem with HTML5 – it creates potential security holes, as well as data and device management headaches. The most simple to grasp are those that involve corporate data residing on a user device, and access to the applications themselves (in terms of provisioning, commissioning and decomissioning).

It is simple enough to point a mobile browser to a Web URL and put the power of HTML5 to use. Through HTML5 you get data persistence on the user device, meaning that a user can continue to work with an app and associated data if offline or disconnected. Using data this way is trickier than it sounds however. A lot of effort would be required in maintaining back end integrity – when the user reconnects is the data still valid? Has anything changed that the user may not be aware of? What if the user loses the device? Can anyone simply reconnect and gain access? There are countless permutations of these basic common issues, including bad mobile app design.

Little Ticking (Tick Tick tick) Time Bombs

These are common issues – they don’t make headlines, they no longer offer encomiums to the latest and greatest devices (by which I mean the security and management issues are created and easily trumped because the devices are so cool that IT has to bend its usually strict rules to allow users to have them)…they simply exist as real - albeit small – problems that could never the less easily become ticking time bombs.

I’m generally enthusiastic about Antenna’s new Volt app platform – there is a lot that it actually does, especially in terms of building hybrid apps that blend HTML5 capabilities with actual device capabilities (such as accessing a device GPS – HTML5 does none of this), and taking the app store out of the app distribution equation. Real time mobile app transactional analytics is also very cool.

But in truth, the coolest thing about Volt is that is restores IT sanity and eliminates IT stress when it comes to totally securing the data and managing the HTML5 Web apps that are now inherently mobile and most typically used in mobile scenarios. The hardware itself is never really the issue – it’s the software and the data that are the real potential culprits.

If the seemingly small device management and mobile data security problems that now amount to little more than a hill of beans for enthusiastic enterprise users of cool new devices are in fact little ticking time bombs with potentially large ramifications, then Volt has a significant new role to play – it becomes possble to completely eliminate these potential mobile enterprise time bombs. Underneath what we might call the glittering stuff (shiny cool devices, accelerometers, etc. etc. etc.) are the not so glamorous mundane day to day issues that cause IT major stress.

What’s one little ticking time bomb? Oh, not much – but it may put things in better perspective to review a post I wrote a while ago when one of those little time bombs exploded at Citibank. Don’t let this happen to you – you will only have yourself – not your demanding users – to blame.

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Tags: Android, Antenna Volt, Device Management, Enterprise Mobility, iPhone, Mobile Apps, Mobile Devices, Mobile Observatory, Mobile Security, Tony Rizzo