14 DAY TRIAL // One year after Samsung announced its KNOX mobile security solution for Galaxy devices, the company is back with iteration 2.0. KNOX 2.0 has been recently unveiled at Mobile World Congress (MWC) 2014, as an evolution of the first version, both in terms of user experience and security features.
According to Samsung, the new features offered by KNOX 2.0 have been especially designed to improve security of Galaxy devices.
The newly announced KNOX 2.0 allows a wider range of protection from kernel to applications, which finally makes it a viable alternative to other security solutions, assuming that one would have the money to purchase it.
Selling its security solution to Galaxy users doesn’t seem to be an issue for Samsung, given the fact that since October 2013, when the first version of KNOX became commercially available on the market, the South Korean company has gathered no less than 1 million active users.
That’s about 210,000 users on average that activate KNOX every month, which translates into about 7,000 devices per day. With the release of version 2.0, this trend will probably increase in the following months.
“Thanks to the rapid adoption of KNOX over the past 5 months since its first commercial availability, we needed to evolve the Samsung KNOX platform to meet the changing needs of our customers and the enterprise as a whole,” said JK Shin, president and CEO, head of IT and mobile communications division at Samsung Electronics.
KNOX 2.0 now offers “Two-factor Biometric Authentication,” which means that users will have to identify themselves with both password and fingerprint in order to authenticate and start using the device.
The improved security solution also supports dual APN capability, which will allow users to modify the data traffic usage of enterprise apps so that it charges that of personal apps.
With KNOX 2.0, you will now be able to install and use any application included in the Google Play Store that supports Android’s multi-user framework, inside the KNOX containers.
Samsung has also announced that it has expended its partner ecosystem, so KNOX 2.0 is now capable of supporting SE Android policy configurations for the following third-party containers: Fixmo’s SafeZone, MobileIron’s AppConnect and Good’s secure container.
A new KNOX Marketplace for enterprises has been announced as well, which will allow customers to buy various KNOX services and applications.
Last but not least, the South Korean company has confirmed that KNOX 2.0 will be commercially available sometime in Q2 2014. The new security solution will also come pre-loaded on the Samsung Galaxy S5, which makes us believe that it will be available in April.
As for users of the previous version of KNOX, Samsung has announced that they will be able to upgrade to version 2.0 for free after updating to Android 4.4.x KitKat.