In a bid to make Android phones more business-friendly, mobile device management technology company Three Laws of Mobility (3LM) will start making its enterprise security platform for Android devices available this week. Founded by Gaurav Mathur and Tom Moss, two former members of Google's Android team, 3LM has developed an Android-specific technology that gives IT administrators the ability to enforce security policies not just on applications on handsets, but the underlying Android operating system as well.

While 3LM, acquired by Motorola Mobility in February, isn't the first to deploy a security solution for Android, 3LM president Tom Moss said in a statement that 3LM's technology is the first to secure the entire Android environment instead of just specific applications. Other solutions either are focused on securing specific applications through integrated management, such as App47, or creating a sandbox on the device like Odyssey Software's Athena.

According to a statement from 3LM issued at the CTIA Enterprise and Applications conference in San Diego today, the company has worked with a number of Android handset manufacturers to make them compatible with 3LM's mobile device management platform. The MDM system provides encryption of all data on the device (including SD cards), password policy enforcement, application whitelisting and blacklisting, and full device or selective remote wiping of data if the device is lost.

Applications can be managed remotely and pushed to or remotely deleted from the phone. And administrators can lock required applications down to prevent the user from removing them. The system can also be used to "breadcrumb" the phone, tracking its movements to locate it if it is lost (or check to see if the user is really out on that sales call). 3LM's technology also provides built-in VPN access to corporate data and applications; the activity of each handset on the network can be tracked by its unique IP address on the VPN.

To get a quicker foot in the door with enterprises, 3LM also announced a partnership with enterprise mobile device management platform provider BoxTone. By hooking into BoxTone's multiplatform MDM environment, 3LM gets hooked up with BoxTone's installed customer base, and BoxTone gets improved support for Android devices out of the deal (as well as license agreements with Motorola and other Android handset manufacturers).