This week at CTIA (News - Alert), AT&T unveiled a solution called AT&T Toggle aimed at helping businesses manage the bring-your-own-device phenomenon.

Businesses are grappling with how to manage and secure their networks, data and applications as employees increasingly use their personal wireless devices for both leisure and work purposes. On the up side, this can create significant savings for businesses, which don’t have to buy the endpoints and pay for related service plans. On the down side, however, it can open up businesses to lost data and other security breaches.

AT&T (News - Alert) Toggle, which comes courtesy of AT&T Foundry, addresses all that by creating a secure mode, accessible via password, where only applications and data “blessed by corporate IT” runs, says Mobeen Khan, executive director of marketing for Advanced Mobility Solutions, a business unit of AT&T Business Solutions. All personal and business apps and data still resides on one device and runs over the same operating system, he explains, but AT&T Toggle puts the business-related stuff in its own container. And this can work on any device (initially it’s available only on Android (News - Alert) devices) and over any wireless service provider network.

End users can elect to set alerts to see when they have a business e-mail, for example. If IT staff allows it, end users also can merge personal and professional content, such as calendars. But IT administrators only have visibility into business-related content and usage.

To enable all that, AT&T Toggle includes a downloadable client as well as an IT administrator portal, which sits in the AT&T cloud and is purchased through AT&T, which helps with provisioning.

AT&T Toggle will be available starting in the fourth quarter on Android 2.2 and better devices. It will sell for $5 a month per subscriber.

Khan says AT&T Toggle puts the company on the path to enable users to log into their content using any device from anywhere by creating, in effect, personal containers of apps and content in the cloud.