The Marine Corps has been looking at commercial alternatives for secure mobile device use for its members, trialing smartphones and tablets provided by Verizon, AT&T and Sprint for the past four months, Nextgov reported Wednesday.William Matthews writes the military service seeks to identify a cheaper, quicker offering comparable to the Pentagon’s mobile phone system that uses policy-based secure partitions or “containers†that control what applications can run in the environment.
The Marines said they will decide on a smartphone system that can provide military-grade security, with expectations of $66 in yearly fees per device.
This is $22 less than the Defense Department’s mobile device management program, which Defense Information Systems Agency said amounts to annual costs of $88 for access to unclassified networks and more than $1,500 for classified networks.
