All previous iPhone generations have lacked the most basic requirement that corporates demand from their mobile devices - data security. Corporates complained, and Apple listened.

With the new iPhone arrival, Apple has beefed up its security features, inching it closer to breaking into the corporate and enterprise market. Introducing hardware based encryption, and remote data wiping.

The widespread appeal of Blackberry with corporates has been primarily down to the enterprise level security it offers, and Apple is making it clear that it wants a share of that lucrative market. Although a big deal by Apple’s standards, the new features still don’t make the iPhone suitable for most corporate environments.

Remote wipe and encryption aren’t good enough on their own inside the iPhone 3G S, said Ken Dulaney, an analyst at Gartner Inc. “They have to be enforced” by the company, Dulaney wrote in an e-mail. He went on to give an example of a company with 500 employees, all running iPhones. Imagine having to send each one of them a memo asking them to turn on the security features of the iPhone. Highly unlikely.

Unless these security features can be “forced” onto the company users, widespread adoption of the device in the enterprise environment seems a tall order.

Another feature lacking on the iPhone (even with the new upgrade) is background processing. Most company users have several applications that they run simultaneously on their devices, and with a single-app limitation on the iPhone, companies have to find work-arounds which tend to be expensive and unnecessary.

Although the new data encryption support, remote wiping, and tethering have been welcomed by the enterprise industry in general, more needs to be done if Apple is to even dent the Blackberry dominated market space.