Most organizations use a mobile device management (MDM) toolset, whether 3rd party or built-in tools. Some organizations recognize that a single vendor’s solution may not meet all of their needs. dcVAST worked with one such customer, who had an existing 3rd party MDM solution that didn’t fill all of their requirements.
Problem
Our customer needed a solution that provided granular support for mobile devices, especially in bring-your-own-device (BYOD) scenarios. Their current solution is designed with an all-or-nothing approach where an agent was installed on each device, and when an employee left the organization there was no other choice than to wipe the entire contents of the device. This obviously isn’t a palatable solution for those folks who use their own devices. Therefore, they began searching for a solution to work side by side with their current toolset, since they didn’t want to lose other existing capabilities; namely being able to access and share files via their internal filer.
Solution
dcVAST introduced Bitglass, which in addition to being one of the best Cloud Access Security Brokers (CASB), also offers a granular MDM solution. Bitglass’ solution works as a reverse proxy, enabling administrators to define Bitglass’ URL in the Exchange mobile device policy. Once defined, admins can then decide who has permission to install Outlook on their mobile device, and then secure just their work profile, leaving other profiles unaffected. When removal of a profile becomes necessary, only the work-related profile is removed during a wipe – leaving other data (such as personal profiles) preserved. Then our customer can remove other access via their existing 3rd party solution. Both solutions work well together and augment the capabilities of the other (an ironic twist in today’s IT vendor vs. vendor paradigm).
Conclusion
Using two solutions may seem like an administrative headache, however in this situation (and others where BYOD is allowed) the trade-off of having selective wipe capability more than justifies the low cost and set-it-and-forget-it nature of the Bitglass technology and policies. And as an added bonus, when our customer completes procurement of Bitglass’ CASB capabilities in the near future, it will benefit from securing their cloud applications, as well.
