With the bring-your-own-device (BYOD) craze hitting enterprises, universities, hospitals, and everywhere between, IT administrators may find a checklist a good option to take charge of what’s coming their way. As millions of employees walk into the new year with devices received as holiday gifts, what better time to buckle down and successfully implement a plan for 2012?

An illustrated depiction of poll results from other MORE Webinars will give you the insight needed to respond to the influx of employee-owned tablets and smartphones at your place of business.

The BYOD party has started, folks. Now its up to IT leadership to decide how it will be handled. It would be wise to act on what the latest statistics say about emerging trends in mobility. To get started on the right track, submit your request for a free evaluation of MaaS360 mobile device management (MDM).

This year, the security of confidential information on mobile devices is a top concern for companies across the world. Executives are being urged to finalize mobile security strategies while IT departments are in the drivers seat for implementation. Screw-ups will assuredly have a lasting backlash on the parties that fail to prepare. To add to the stress, data growth is running rampant and the release of lost and stolen information has become more damaging with each new headline. The margin for error is thin indeed.

If your company has made major systematic changes, taken a closer look at its processes, or made changes to how it uses technology, you shouldn’t be surprised. These are all reactionary moves in face of a quickly changing landscape. For many companies, addressing the growing number of mobile workers has been the biggest struggle.

Every day, new devices equipped with new technology and sensitive data are connecting to the corporate network, spelling out potential for disaster for many CIOs. Who could blame them for being paranoid? The security of data is too important to ignore.

Take for example the results of a poll conducted by the Dimensional Research for Check Point Software Technologies. 71% of IT professionals believe an uptick in security events experienced by their company during the past two years can be attributed to increased mobile device use. On that point, 78% said they’ve seen such use of smartphones and tablets double in that time.

At first glance, it seems as if there’s a connection between the security incidents and the increased use of devices, or the iPads, iPhones, and Androids being brought to work by employees. Cloud computing, “hacktivism”, and mobility have brought a lot of change to the world of enterprise IT in recent years; the more reliant companies become on these new technologies and ideas, risk will continue to increase.

What we are unsure of, however, is the mobility environment of each IT professional polled, and what tools they were using at work. Without knowing, how can we attribute the rise in data breaches to smartphones and tablets? A mobile device management (MDM) solution allows proper implementation of a given mobile security strategy while giving the director the means to oversee their device inventory. In other words, it provides peace of mind in place of frustration.

What is your company doing to manage the mobile devices connecting to the corporate network? If devices are being kept at home as a preventative measure, you could be missing out on potential for increased productivity and a practical means for doing work. Share your story with us in the comments below.

Smartphone banking is today’s smart way of managing money on the go. We’ve all come to appreciate it for the simplicity and convenience it offers us. While the perks are great (quick access to funds, account balance summaries anytime, anywhere) safety and privacy have remained prime concerns.

For this reason, I’ve come up with a checklist of best practices to keep in mind while enjoying the smartphone banking experience:

1. Download your relevant banking application on the mobile device. Ensure that your banking app receives its software updates to avoid any exploitation of the software loopholes by hackers. Also, it is recommended that you use any tools or Internet browsers recommended by your bank. This way you may be certain that account information and any financial transactions are relayed in a secured and encrypted manner.
2. Refrain from using public wireless networks to avoid any hackers sniffing into your mobile device and stealing your important and confidential financial information. It’s a good idea to connect to your smartphone banking application over a secured or private wireless network.
3. Be cautious when accessing your account. Banking applications typically prompt the smartphone user for a login password each time they log in to keep a check on any fraud activity. If you find any unusual behavior while accessing your account details, report it to your bank for further investigation.
4. Cover your tracks! Some banking applications store sensitive and confidential data in clear text. After every mobile transaction, you must check for any data traces left behind on the phone.
5. Always lock your phone when not using it to prevent unauthorized user access. Check your phone settings and enable the auto-lock feature if you have a tendency to keep your phone unlocked.
6. Ensure that your mobile device has remote wipe installed or enabled. This security feature is a must; the foremost feature every smartphone user must set up lest the device falls into the wrong hands. Also, notify your financial institution about your lost device so that no texts or emails containing your account details or other financial matters will be sent to your mobile device.
7. Refrain from sending or sharing any financial data over text messages. It is an easy way of exposing critical information to hackers or cyber criminals. Also, delete or ignore any messages or emails received from unknown senders asking for your account details.
8. Use strong and complex passwords for your mobile banking account. It is a good practice to have passwords that are eight or more characters, using numbers, symbols, letters and punctuation instead of ‘1234’ or passwords based on your birthday or anniversary.

Do you have any recommendations for safe banking on smartphones? Please share your suggestions and comments below. If you’re a financial institution looking to keep your device inventory secure, see how an MDM solution can help.

This brings up a lot of issues for any industry where privacy and security is important. You want to make sure you know exactly where account information is and who has access to it. For banks and credit unions, the penalties for lost data can be severe.

You’ll need policies that give data access to those who truly need it. Policies that require passcodes, encryption, and more. Did you know that early versions of some platforms have very few security features? Policies, if enforced correctly, can be used to keep devices on later versions of the software.

Alerts are helpful, too. Would your IT department like to know when a device is jailbroken or rooted? How about when a user exceeds the threshold on their monthly data plan? Mobile Device Management (MDM) can do all this and more.

A good MDM solution lets you:

• Enforce passcode type, complexity, length and how often they have to be changed
• Specify if users can set their devices to show the text of the passcodes when they enter them
• Specify if the data on the device must be encrypted (when supported by the manufacturer)
• Turn off device features like the camera, Bluetooth, and tethering
• Blacklist, approve or require certain apps
• Specify enforcement actions that will be taken automatically if the device is out of compliance
• Securely push apps to devices
• Securely push documents to devices and prevent them from being forwarded, if necessary
• Perform actions on the device, including:
  • Remote wipe
  • Remote lock
  • Block
  • Locate
  • Reset passcode

For Financial institutions, it’s not enough to say that your devices are secure. You have to be able to prove it if you need to. If a device with financial information is lost, you’ll need to be able to prove that the device was encrypted, or that it was wiped after the loss was reported.

You’ll need to be able to see:

• All the software and apps installed
• If the device is fully encrypted
• The history of the device, including if it has been wiped
• The total roaming mobile data usage for the last six months
• Whether devices are owned by your institution or by the user
• If the device is jailbroken or routed (a potential source of malware)

The bring-your-own-device (BYOD) trend has picked up a lot of steam in recent months and doesn’t look to be slowing down any time soon. Technological advances, a growing number of mobile workers, and gadget affordability have all played a role in the takeoff process. In some ways this trend presents cause for concern; an increasing number of employees are sitting in their company’s drivers seat and calling the shots in ways they shouldn’t be. The device-types supported in a given corporate environment are no longer stemming from the will of the IT director. In many cases the line is being drawn by the employees who are bringing their personal-owned devices to the office.

InfoWorld expert Galan Gruman has made note of common problem areas and provided a few tips for how your organization can derive benefit and forget the troubles:

Gruman insists we can’t be naive. From his vantage point, companies have one thing in mind when making the transition to BYOD: money. Increased productivity and satisfaction born of BYOD programs are an added benefit, and that’s all. “Their goals are naive, so what should be viewed as a positive outcome isn’t. The problem is not that BYOD itself is negative, it’s that many companies do it for the wrong reason and don’t get what they wanted.” To remedy the problem, companies must define clear, concise, attainable goals that cover all aspects of mobility.

Gruman’s second point involves the cost of supporting your mobile workforce. The costs of BYOD can add up when mobile expenses aren’t managed properly. For this reason, Gruman rejects expensing bills in favor of flat rates. Why? No company could ever rid itself of its mobility costs; the company can always expect to receive requests for compensation of some kind. When this happens, Gruman advises not to allow your employees to fill out expense reports. These will add up from processing fees alone. Instead, companies should add a flat rate or a mobility stipend onto their employees’ paychecks each month. That way, they get the money required to pay their wireless bills and the company meets its goal of saving on mobility costs.

How do you BYOD at your company? If you aren’t factoring in any of Gruman’s advice, why not? Take some time now to think why you are managing your devices the way you are, and decide whether its the best option going forward. If you aren’t sure, maybe your workforce is. Perhaps consider sending out a survey to determine what your employees would prefer. After you have your strategy set, make sure you implement it in the most cost effective way you can to attain maximum benefit.

Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) eliminates the need to install applications on the customer hardware. SaaS applications are typically accessed from a web browser and a single instance of the application often serves all the customers. Since the same application instance needs to fulfill different needs for different customers and there may be no option of creating a custom build for each customer, customizability of SaaS applications becomes an important aspect for delivering personalized software to the users. Customizability enables easy integration of the SaaS application with the customers existing systems and also empowers partners and resellers to easily configure the solution according to their and their customer’s requirements.

In one of our last posts, we discussed some of the key architecture tenets of a SaaS application – multi-tenancy, customizability, scalability, and security. This post focuses on different customization techniques that we have used in MaaS360 to make it flexible and configurable to address our customers’ and partners’ needs.

1. Look and Feel of a UI: Look and feel is one of the most important types of customizations for a SaaS product. Why?

• Firstly, it provides an option to the customer or a partner to brand the software
• Secondly, by changing the font, colors, and images used in the system, one can make it look similar to the existing systems that the user is familiar with

So, how do you ensure that the look and feel of your application is customizable?

By using CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) for styling the web pages rather than hard-coding the styles within the HTML or JSP. 

Create a set of CSS files that define the default look and feel of your application. For customization, these CSS files can be overridden at a reseller or customer level to personalize elements like colors, fonts, backgrounds etc. The application should pick up the appropriate CSS file based on the user. Images displayed on your web pages can also be customized by storing different images in the file system or the database and picking the relevant image based on the user context.

Apart from the web pages, emails sent by the system to the user can also be customized for content, sender, subject, logos, links and signatures. We highly recommend creating email templates for emails that need to be configured per customer requirements.

So how does this work?

Most of the modern programming languages provide a library to format the date/time/number etc. based on a user’s locale. Make sure you are not hard-coding the display formats but format it based on the logged in user’s context and locale using the in-built functions.

Content localization can be achieved by using language resource bundles in your code. All the language specific content should be isolated from the web pages, so rather than hard-coding English strings in the web pages you should use constants that are replaced by the relevant text at runtime based on the user’s locale and language. If your application uses a database to display the content, the data model must be designed to store the content for each supported locale.

3. Role-based Access: It is critical for a SaaS application to provide different levels of access for different users. For example, in the MaaS360 portal, a Master Administrator can create, publish and assign policies to devices whereas a Help Desk Engineer can only assign policies. Similarly, a customer must be able to customize a user’s role by adding/removing access to certain workflows. It is also important that all portal actions are audited with the user and time information.

MaaS360 achieves this by adding support for role-based access in the application. A set of roles are defined for the application with each role having a set of permissions for different modules of the application. All the application modules check for the required permission before providing access to a workflow or functionality. A user can be assigned one or more roles. When a user logs in, he gets access to the workflows based on the roles assigned to him.

Customizability of a SaaS application can be a big pain if the above points are not well discussed and understood during the design and planning phase. By following these you can ensure that your application is ready for adoption by partners, resellers and customers.

Is your enterprise facing any specific issue while adopting customizability for your SaaS applications? Are there any points you would like to add? Looking forward to learning based on what you share from your experiences.

So, which tablet did you receive over the holiday season? Was it the Kindle Fire, the Motorola Xoom, or the iPad?

With the iPad dominating the tablet ecosystem early 2011, this is a question you rarely would have heard or thought to ask. But as the year continued, technology progressed, and many more tablets entered the ring. While market sales indicate that Amazon’s Kindle Fire was the most popular device of the 2011 holiday shopping season, the iPad should continue to fare well. The risks of Android fragmentation in the context of device management may scare off enough to work in their favor. The bottom line is, the the tablet market is gaining momentum and is on the rise…with names such as the Asus Transformer Prime, the Samsung Galaxy Y, and BlackBerry’s PlayBook to add to the bunch.

According to IDC France, the tablet market is forecasted to bypass 4.1 million this year, representing a 48% growth in comparison to 2011. I do not however believe that tablets will dominate laptops or desktops, as each of these devices serves its own purpose.

Let me explain…

Like many of you, I own an Android, an iPad, a home machine for my parents and a work machine for my corporate assignments. As mentioned above, each of these devices serve a specific purpose and in my opinion are irreplaceable. I’ll use my iPad to read while I’m traveling for example, or to watch videos on my own time. But no matter how useful it may be, I cannot make the full transition from my computers given the comparably insufficient internal storage it provides. Another thing–the tablet keyboard isn’t user-friendly enough for me to write pages and pages without hurting my hands or wrists. Tablets are good for composing and sending a few emails a day, but I prefer my corporate machine if I need to respond to more than 20.

One of the main reasons tablets are gaining popularity is their ‘touch screens’ and ‘portability’. Many industries, such as education and healthcare, are already using these types of devices for information sharing. Like any other novice technology, tablets do face a good share of challenges, all of which are relevant to consumers and enterprise users:

1. Many smartphone users find it redundant to own a smartphone and a tablet. Tablet vendors and product strategists must deliver high tech, more compact, feature- and application-rich tablets at competitive prices. Some other tablet needs include: easy access to SD cards, better USB support, and better or’real’ keyboards for authors, students, teachers, etc…, who write more than one page per day.

2. Preserving data integrity and preventing mobile malware infestations continue to be key concerns within the mobile ecosystem. Do tablet users securely access business or banking apps? Or enterprise content over public networks? Do they follow the basic security practices for preventing unauthorized access and data breaches?

3. Rise of personally-owned tablets in workplaces, or BYOD (bring-your-own-device): Gartner recently predicted that “By 2016, at least 50 percent of enterprise email users will rely primarily on a browser, tablet or mobile client instead of a desktop client.” As employees and mobile workers bring their portable computers to work, have organizations defined their tablet management strategy? Are they prepared to handle this sudden influx of employee- and corporate-owned smartphones and tablets in their workplaces?

4. 2012 will witness the rise of a more fragmented tablet market. This implies more choices for consumers, which is certainly good news for those looking to address specific needs. However, enterprises must have a robust and scalable infrastructure to accomodate the upcoming releases or needs of the dynamic mobile market.

As an iPad user, I believe the tablets are here to stay. They have their own market but tablet computing needs to evolve.

Don’t you agree that this tablet trend is on? And for all you tablet-owners out there, what kind do you have and what has your experience been like so far?

Yep, it’s that time of year again. As people begin removing lights and ornaments from their trees and taking off those goofy Near Years Eve sunglasses, tech pundits across the web are relaying their forecasts and views of what enterprise technology landscape will look like in 2012…

Unsurprisingly, enterprise mobility has figured prominently on just about every list that has been published. Two of the more recent ones from InformationWeek and PCWorld specifically addressed the role that tablets will play in mobile device management (MDM) programs this year.

According to InformationWeek, the IT professionals’ view of tablets has flip-flopped over the past few years. In 2010, when Apple instituted the dawn of a new era with the iPad, the majority of IT pros said the devices would be a “non-event”. Just two years later this stance has begun eroding.

Now it seems that IT pros are jumping on the tablet bandwagon, as it has become obvious that they can provide access and productivity benefits. These feelings aren’t yet ubiquitous, but its heading in that direction.

“Our bet? They will be, you will support them, and you’ll do so in pretty substantial numbers during the next few years,” the report stated, referring to tablets serving as mobile professionals’ tool of choice and companies lending support to them.

In conjunction with this prediction, the PCWorld report insinuates laptop replacement (with tablets) can actually support an organization’s mobile expense management program.

The move can go a long way in lowering capital expenditures. What’s more, tablets will boost the employees’ satisfaction, as the devices have been built for enjoyment and ease of use. Such factors ensure tablets are utilized to their fullest extent and professionals get all they can out of them.

PCWorld warns however that organizations must address security concerns when implementing tablets. Vendors have already begun to recognize such needs and are developing antivirus and encryption solutions focused exclusively on tablets.

“Consumerization” is the buzzword right now, as more organizations look for ways to support personal-owned devices in the new year. Do you bring your own device to work? Or do you leave your tablet at home?

Since its release last month, industry pundits have debated whether the low-cost Amazon kindle fire will be the one to disrupt the immense market lead enjoyed by the Apple iPad. Earlier discussions point to the fire as the best competitor yet…

There have been plenty of candidates, including the Samsung Galaxy Tab, Motorola Xoom and RIM’s BlackBerry PlayBook. So far, none have come close to clutching the coattails of the iPad.

This has held true in both the consumer and enterprise markets. The latter has been a goldmine for Apple and opened a door which had previously been sealed shut, where such devices were once perceived as entirely consumer-focused. The door has steadily creaked open as more companies experience the benefits of the iPad with use of a mobile device management platform.

The kindle fire is the latest competitor looking to knock the iPad from its throne. Based on Amazon’s line of popular Kindle eReaders, the device sports a pared-down version of Google’s Android mobile operating system.

But can it compete with the iPad in the enterprise segment? This was the topic of a recent IT World Canada report, where several experts weighed in on the idea of business professionals making use of the kindle fire.

One area that is sure to please any IT administrator’s mobile expense concerns is the device’s price tag. At a low-end price of $199, the tablet by all accounts is a robust and formidable offering.

What’s more, the device gives users direct access to Amazon’s high-powered network and one of the largest and most popular cloud services on the market. It may not be up there with Apple in the application department, but this figures to change the longer it is on the market. Once developers get their bearings straight with the device, companies can expect an influx of new offerings tailored to the mobile professional’s needs.

So, if your company is among the many looking leverage tablets as a part of an enterprise mobility program, the low-cost, highly versatile kindle fire is worth a look. What are your thoughts?

Did you know that around 45% of the mobile workforce has a job that is compatible with a certain amount of mobile commuting? Wow!

Telecommuting is slowly turning into a motivating factor for employees to stick with their company. While the employee benefits from flexible work hours, improved productivity and better work-life balance, the employer benefits from easy and anytime reach to his employees. These benefits of this win-win situation make the distance between co-workers less significant, and work as an effective retention strategy for the employer (as this CNBC report explains).

Needless to say, laptops, iPhones, Androids and tablets (iPads in particular) are the biggest enablers for the change in this working trend. Today’s mobile workforce is made up of individuals who own multiple devices. They use each one differently in their daily processes such as communicating, scheduling, and storing data. In response, mobile IT administrators are looking for ways to control the types of devices accessing corporate information, impose penalty actions for human errors (lost, stolen, damaged devices), and prevent lingering mobile malware threats from penetrating their network.

Securing a given body of mobile workers can be a challenging task, and the challenges multiply when workers demand ubiquitous access to information on any device. Rather than imposing restrictions on devices or type of information accessed, IT administrators can implement the following steps to manage and secure their mobile workforce:

1. Enforce strong password policies on all devices. You may use a mobile device management (MDM) solution to impose password policies and quarantine actions when the maximum number of password attempts has been exceeded.
2. Maintain visibility and control across all your devices and their applications
3. Ensure the healthy state of all your devices to avoid any malware infestations. Educate users (via email, alerts, notifications) about the upcoming patches for different mobile operating systems and any mobile malwae making the rounds. Encourage your users to install multiple anti-virus products to keep their devices away from any spam or Trojans.
4. Ensure that no consumer apps or malicious apps are accessing any corporate data. Use a mobile application management (MAM) solution to keep an eye on apps and their behavior. With a MAM solution, you can set rules for accessing corporate data only on a secured tunnel.
5. Keep an eye on any lost, stolen, or damaged devices. Using an MDM solution, you can set flags or notifications for any lost or stolen devices. If required, you may also define auto-quarantine actions.
6. Identify rogue devices and restrict them to avoid any interference with corporate security.
7. Ensure 24/7 support for your mobile workers. They should have help available to avoid any business downtime.
8. Consider creating a sandbox for testing new technologies in different environments. These can remain until they are deemed ready for the mobile workers.

Are there any other challenges you face that you would like to discuss? Feel free to share below. We’d love to hear from you and help where we can.