It’s one thing to let employees bring their phone to work and use it to access company information, but it’s quite another to force them to submit to remote wipes should they misplace the device. Nobody wants a draconian, big brother employer having that much control over their own phones.

I wrote about a novel approach to this problem a year and a half ago. What I proposed was treating a sandbox, or secure container on the device as an extension of the Cloud, where you could run secure apps and download confidential information. Unauthorized parties wouldn’t be able to access the secure sandbox even if they stole the device, and any remote wipe would then simply deprovision the container, leaving the rest of the phone untouched.

However, I wasn’t aware of any vendor who was managing BYOD following such an approach – that is, until now. Kaseya has just announced the launch of a new BYOD solution that resulted from their acquisition of Rover Apps earlier this year. The newly christened Kaseya BYOD Suite offers just the sort of secure, device-based container I was recommending.

Still on Kaseya’s roadmap, however, is the full Cloud story. On the back office side the BYOD Suite offers a traditional on-premise management interface. But the writing is on the wall, as everything is moving to Cloud these days. Once Kaseya moves the back end to SaaS (or perhaps PaaS, since APIs come with the territory), then they will have a true “Cloud on the device” that ZapThink believes is the future of BYOD.