Recently in San Jose, California, Rich Tehrani, CEO of TMC, had the chance to sit down with Adam Stein (News - Alert), marketing director of mobile device management provider MobileIron.

Stein opened the conversation with, “We make it safe and secure for enterprises to deploy iOS, Android (News - Alert), Blackberry, and Symbian, securely deploy applications and for people to bring their own devices to work.”

In regards to how secure these solutions work Stein stated, “Right now in the industry there is a phenomenon called ‘shadow IT’, which is really people bringing their own devices and finding ways to circumvent the systems. Well what happens now, with mobile device management powered by MobileIron, people can bring their own devices (BYOD) to work but they can’t get access to email, WiFi (News - Alert), and they don’t have certificate permissions to access Active Sync. With mobile device management, they can now do all of that with permission-based access.” 

Stein added, “Apps are a big part of what’s happening in the mobile workspace. If you have either an iPhone (News - Alert) or Android device or tablet, it doesn’t matter which people want to use apps. That’s the reason that data is running through the veins of the devices in the first place—they want to use more and more apps. And so, if you download apps at home that are ‘blacklisted’ or ‘graylisted’ at work, you can flag those as not permitted applications and then the IT director using things like MobileIron, will get a flag that that person has an unapproved application on it and can then take action based on that flag.”

When Tehrani asked how MobileIron helps its customers in terms of solving challenges they would have if they didn’t use these solutions, Stein commented, “There are three ways. First, they can bring in employee owned devices and have corporate owned devices all together, managed as one workforce across all different operating systems. Second, we can help them save money because we can actually manage usage of that device as we have a software agent on the device communicating to the backend at all times, so instead of getting bill later on and being in ‘bill shock’, users can receive a real-time threshold of how much data they are using. Third, the mobile device management solution manages all of the applications as to who receives access to what applications and what devices.”

“You can easily setup up policies or labels in devices stating this person gets access to these policies, permissions and these resources. This can be setup on a granular basis or a group basis—so for example, all manufacturing employees gets these permissions, while all HR employees get these,” Stein added.

In regards to customer types the company powers, Stein commented, “We have about 700 customers a day; a lot of Fortune 500s are current customers. There are faster moving markets in the technology space than others, such as healthcare, manufacturing, finance, education and government but the neat thing about this solution is that is can go across every single vertical market, due to the fact they all are using the next generation of computing devices which are smartphones and tablets.”

“People need to understand how to use apps in the enterprise. The BYOD strategy is a very important one for enterprises as they can save a lot of time and money, and increase productivity when using these devices,” Stein said.

Tehrani concluded, “You have to have solutions like this for compliance and security reasons, and for a whole host of other reasons, which prompted Stein to respond, “And companies are able to save a great deal of time and money, as employees can now access their own version of the MobileIron solution reducing the need for for the help desk, as the help desk no longer needs to do everything as the employee can just call in online, pack it into their own device and even have the option to lock the phone, or find the phone if it gets lost.”

For more information, see the full video below.