MaaS360: Blowing the Lid off BYOD Containers for Security and Productivity

Something like this has happened to everyone: The main office uses PCs but you go to another office, maybe a client, and they use Macs. Or you’re on vacation in another country and you want to check your email, so you go into an internet café and the keyboard is all different—with letters that look like c, d, G, and k. The result: even though everything is basically in the right place it’s still a little bit off, enough so that it drives you nuts and takes eight times as long to do anything.

This was the user experience with early forays into containerized data on smartphones and tablets. Experiences so far from the native functionality of the devices or any traditional computing endeavor, that many users begged to carry two phones simply to avoid learning a virtually new mobile OS (and to avoid a plethora of crashes). It prioritized security over usability without considering that Bring Your Own Device started with a productivity-first mantra. However, some degradation of user-friendliness was acceptable since any productivity port in a storm is much better than no productivity at all.

Historically, companies put up with less than optimal mobile usability because they accepted that the ability to work outside of the office came with some level of compromise in user experience. Today, sacrifice is only for those unwilling to embrace change. MaaS360 has always embraced a productivity-first mantra by insisting that any security policies or controls preserve native device functionality in equal step with security.

The MaaS360 Secure Productivity Suite is more than a brand; it represents the ideology of balance between the manipulation and preservation of data. Email, calendars, contacts, along with content workflows and editing, are all immediately recognizable in form and function. The only time users will notice a difference is when they run into a security policy preventing them from sending data to places you don’t want it to go.

With the MaaS360 Secure Productivity Suite, you can prevent data leakage by controlling emails and attachments. This facet of the larger Enterprise Mobility Management suite also conducts online and offline compliance checks before email can be accessed. You can set it to restrict forwarding, moving data to other applications via cut and paste restrictions, and screen captures. This last point is a very important consideration as public apps embed deeper into the enterprise and homegrown programs are updated to serve the app world.

No two companies have the exact same security needs, which is why the MaaS360 Enterprise Mobility Management doesn’t take a “one size fits all” approach. You can turn services on as your business and security needs grow. It has a wide range of mobile security options that let you decide how much you want to separate corporate and personal information across different categories of users, devices, data and apps. This gives you the flexibility to offer tiered or layered mobile security to address varied end user needs and IT security requirements.

MaaS360 lets organizations phase in BYOD, corporate owned and personally enabled (COPE) devices, or any combination between. What’s most important is that the platform never constrains your ambitions for a mobile workforce, nor burdens you with an all-in approach before you are ready. MaaS360 helps ensure mobile security investments are the right size for different classes of users, departments, geographies, devices and applications—all from a single platform.

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