With the increased involvement of these super smart mobile devices in businesses, the risk of Data theft or passing a vulnerability into your business network has definitely increased. The difference between the Corporate and Personal devices is getting thinner by the day.?At one hand letting the employee’s use of their personal device definitely enhances productivity and reduces business cost, on the other hand it definitely increases the risk for your organisation. There are various financial organizations which prefer not to allow employee to carry their mobile devices to the work place due to data security and possible theft reasons.?However, such restrictions definitely makes employees unsatisfied to be separated from their beloved mobile device.
In such scenario’s implementing a Mobile Device Management (MDM) solution makes a lot of business sense. MDM not only lets you have a better control over the data stored on Corporate or Employee owned devices via Encryption or remote wipe or container facility but also can ensure to secure organization’s from potential thefts by disabling Camera, Bluetooth, wifi and many other settings on the phone.
The major reason which has generated the need of MDM solutions are BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) culture and hence I personally believe that a good MDM solution should be able to meet the requirement to secure/restrict the mobile devices while employee are at work and the device should be back to normal when they are off work, after all why would someone want to lock down their personal Smart Phone just because they work for a security centric company and why should they, it’s their own device and not company provided asset.
We started our search for a MDM solution from Windows Intune and found it to be quite deficient in terms of features and especially to support BYOD.?The biggest draw back with Intune was that the control or restriction placed on devices were ?permanent and not time bound or location bound. So, if I block the access to camera on a user’s phone then it will remain blocked even if the user is not in office, hence?it defeats the purpose of BYOD completely, which is when we decided to dig a little further and found MaaS 360.
As explained above MaaS 360 is a solution well capable to secure BYOD devices because of the location-based Policies it supports. After enrolling a device in MaaS 360 they can be segregated into different groups and then various compliance and security group policies can be applied on these devices just like Active directory Group policies. Apart from the regular policies which are applied on groups or devices, we also have an option to apply policies on the basis of locations or the Wifi SSID the device is connected to. Location-based policies comes really handy to mark the location around your office and ensure that the mobile devices become a complaint to corporate policies as soon as one steps into the office.
Preventing data theft is really important for any company but for organisations dealing in financial, banking domain or any organisation which has any kind of sensitive customer data it is imperative to deploy such solutions. An MDM solutions not only prevents organisation’s data from an employee with wrong intentions but also prevent data theft due to accidental loss of mobile devices with advance auto protect features as Wipe after certain number of incorrect password and by forcing strong encryption algorithm on devices.
MaaS 360 offers various security features to prevent data theft like
- Enforce Data encryption
- Remote wipe
- Disable Camera
- Disable NFC
- Disable Bluetooth
- Disable Wifi Direct
- Enforce secure passwords and password expiry
- Secure Browser
- Secure Data container
- and numerous more…
Apart from this the solution can also keep a tab on mobile device locations which may be required by companies to track their field agents to ensure quick dispatch to closest location or any other business purpose.
We found the product very intriguing and way ahead of any competition. It has various solution packages / add-ons which can be clubbed together to make the best solution for end-user.
We recommend the solution to our clients and will be very happy to access your needs of a MDM solution and get you the best value license from IBM.
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