(Newswire.net — May 3, 2013) Seoul, South Korea — On Friday Samsung Electronics announced that the Galaxy S4 Smartphone enabled with is Knox Security Software has been approved by the Pentagon for government use.
“We are very pleased to announce that the U.S. Department of Defense has approved Samsung Knox-enabled devices for use in DoD networks,” Samsung Mobile President JK Shin said in a statement. “This approval enables other government agencies and regulated industries such as health care and financial services to adopt Samsung Galaxy smartphones and tablets. This is a significant milestone for Samsung as we work to grow our relationships within government and large corporate enterprises.”
Receiving approval from the Pentagon means that the Galaxy S4 Smartphone and future Knox-enabled mobile devices can be used by multiple U.S. Government agencies that tap into the Department of Defense networks.
Knox (named after Fort Know) is a multilayered security solution for Android devices that enables a seperate (locked down) secure work enviroment. All of your storage, apps, and credentials are kept separate between your work and personal environments, and Samsung provides its own app-signing process for software it deems to be safe as well as limiting inter-app communication to Knox apps.
To gain such approval, the S4and the Knox software had to pass the the highest security standards in the world for mobile operating systems.
The Pentagon currently has some 600,000 users of smart phones, computer tablets and other mobile devices. The department has 470,000 BlackBerry users, 41,000 Apple users and 8,700 people with Android devices. Most Apple and Android systems are in pilot or test programs.
The move to open up the networks to a broader array of mobile devices is part of a Pentagon effort to ensure the military has access to the latest communications technology without locking itself in to a particular equipment vendor.
The Pentagon also announced this week it expected to clear Apple mobile devices using the iOS 6 system shortly.
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