Today’s businesses must balance the security of their communication networks against usability by their employees. Many large scale business internal communications use mobile devices—usually Blackberries these days—and that opens up a host of security issues. Since a great deal of employees happen to use the company’s systems, often without permission or knowledge, from their personal devices, these issues already exist in spaces. Most companies resolve this problem by locking down their internal, mobile communications to proprietary devices; but Juniper Networks is looking into breaking free from this by making a service that allows secure communication from personal devices.

The Junos Pulse Mobile Security Suite protects smartphones and other intelligent mobile devices from viruses, malware, loss, theft, physical compromise and other threats. It also delivers robust remote device management tools. Junos Pulse Mobile Security Suite includes antivirus, personal firewall, anti-spam, loss and theft prevention, and monitoring and control services purpose built for smartphones and other “smart” mobile devices.

It remotely backs up and restores data, can locate devices in the event they are lost or stolen, and can send an alert when a SIM has been removed, swapped or replaced. Junos Pulse Mobile Security Suite empowers enterprises to provide users secure mobile device access to the corporate network and its sensitive applications. It also offers service providers an opportunity to deliver value-added services, such as parental controls, to consumers.

The Juno Pulse suite of tools leverages cloud-based services to do heavy computing off the mobile phone to detect and prevent problems before they reach the mobile, such as the antivirus, stateful firewall, backups, and anti-spam. And, as long as the backups remain secure within Juno’s cloud network, if the device is lost or destroyed a new one could be commissioned and imitated with the old backup data as if the employee had never lost theirs—add in the ability to remotely wipe the phone’s data and it’s a good step towards a defense against potential corporate espionage.

With business networks becoming internally more and more like social networks, this sort of development might allow them to roll out suites like Apple’s MobileMe; but still enable them to keep it secure, permitting their employees to stay on top of the ball, in contact with each other, and all without accidentally leaking sensitive information into the wild.

The part that really caught my attention on the security angle happens to be an adaptive method of detecting the swapping or replacement of SIM cards. As removing and scanning a SIM card is often require for cloning or bugging a phone, that would do a lot to head off a great deal of attempts to tap into the phone’s communication.

Recently, businesses like JPMorgan and other large banking industry paragons have been looking into testing alternatives to the Blackberry and I’ve said that they’d have to roll their own security tools suite, this sort of development will go a long way to allowing any phone that it runs on to become the secure platform businesses are looking for.

We’re live at Juniper’s press event today; be sure to tune into our live coverage, at SiliconANGLE.TV. Below is a video from our studios, contemplating mobile security.