Bring on the BYOD Chaos — MaaS360 Has You Covered

“Command and control” always seems like a good idea even though it almost never is. It sounds like one person gives the orders and then people do as they are told. This is, of course, most appealing if you get to be the person in charge, the one who gets to create order out of the chaos of whatever system it is you want to be in charge of.

Problem is that outside of the military it almost never works. Just think about the command-and-control economy the old Soviet Union had. It was supposed to be a centralized rational system where one person or group could see the needs of the entire nation and set policies that answered those needs. Didn’t really work out for them, though. That’s because one entity couldn’t figure out something as complex as an entire economic system. Too many inputs, outputs and plenty of unexpected situations.

The world is a messy, crazy chaotic place and that can be a good thing. It can create competition, so a lot of different people or groups are working to fill different economic needs. Out of this comes good old fashioned capitalism with our friend the invisible hand of the marketplace distributing goods and services where they are needed.

But there are limits to how chaotic everything can get. Even free markets need to have rules and regulations. Those rules are there to protect everyone and ensure the greatest economic good. That’s why we have things like contract law and laws against insider trading and misrepresentation.

All of which brings us to BYOD.

Huh?

In a perfect world there would be one OS and one set of devices that met all the needs of your employees. For better or worse we live in an imperfect world. Some folks use Apple devices, some use Windows, some Android, some Linux depending on what works best for them. Each of those devices enables that person to do what he or she does best. To quote a Chinese saying, “There is chaos under heaven – the situation is excellent.”

BYOD, just like capitalism, requires rules and regulations to prevent creative chaos from degenerating into anarchy that puts everyone at risk. IBM MaaS360 is that regulator. It gives you one platform to manage all those different devices with all their different flavors of OS and it lets you do it instantly.

It provides flexible approaches for enrollment, asset management, policy enforcement and the distribution of profiles, apps and docs. All this is based on whether the device is corporate or employee-owned. MaaS360 can rapidly give people secure access to corporate data from their personal devices. It works over-the-air, so it doesn’t matter where the device is. This untethered enterprise mobility management approach also allows for instant day updates to be shared with users when new operating systems like iOS 8 hit the market, or iterative OS versions are available to enhance security or device functionality.

IBM MaaS360 can:

• Establish an automated device approval process

• Simplify the enrollment steps for employees
• Authenticate users against corporate AD/LDAP
• Set specific BYOD configuration options over the air
• Provision email settings
• Perform automated actions when a device goes out of compliance
• Separate corporate and personal data on devices
• Distribute apps and docs to personal devices
• Selectively wipe corporate data without impacting personal files
• Implement a self-service support portal for users
• Set privacy settings to block the collection of personal information
• Deliver usage monitoring alerts to help employees control expenses

Go here to find out more about how IBM MaaS360 gives you control over security without having to command what device everyone uses.