Consider the Best Approach for Your BYOD Mobility Environment

MDM Today and the Future

Mobile devices have quickly become a mainstay in enterprise environments and continue to be consumer driven, and yet they find their way into our day-to-day business lives. As these new devices are being brought into the work environment by employees, enterprise IT is increasingly being forced to accommodate for business use. This is not new news. We observe this pattern through our customers today and live this phenomenon within our own everyday work environment at Cisco. Here at Cisco, employees have the flexibility to choose their device and to securely connect to voice, video and data services from anywhere under an Any Device policy. Cisco manages over 64,000 mobile devices today.

The mobile device has become the primary device for 44% of the end users per recent research, and IT administrators need to manage and control the mobile device to minimize risk and enable productivity. A key tactic being used today to drive greater control and overall user experience is Mobile Device Management (MDM). The adoption of MDM is growing with over a third of organizations to date, according to most of the industry research. MDM exclusively addresses the management of mobile devices. It offers inventory management, software updates, and endpoint security and compliance.

Customers also demand complete end-to-end visibility and control of all mobile devices (registered with MDM or not). And one cannot forget that not all devices that connect to the network are mobile — non-mobile devices must be managed as well under one network policy platform. This can be achieved by uniting the power of endpoint and network management. So the winning answer is combining expertise from the following:

• mobile device management (MDM) +
• mobile application management (MAM) +
• network policy & management

Consider Your MDM Approach

Just as mobile business needs have evolved so has the one-size-fits-all MDM solution to the right size model. The reality is most IT solutions extend across organizations with very diverse requirements for:

• Functionality
• Deployment
• Financial

Are the requirements for a large enterprise with a very diverse workforce along with heavy access compliance requirements and dedicated IT resources similar to those of a medium size organization with limited IT team and basic mobile access requirements? – Not Really.

Choose Your Mobility/BYOD Solution

Cisco brings the winning combination of extensive network and mobile device intelligence to deliver the most comprehensive secure access and highly productive user experience with a choice of deployment options that scale and are flexible to fit the customer needs. Cisco offers a simple choice of a platform or service approach to easily meet the vast requirements.

MDM as a Platform Choice: Cisco ISE & MDM Partners

A MDM platform seems to be the prevalent approach today (over 80% MDM solutions are on-premise, per Gartner). Cisco ISE is integrated with leading MDM partners (Airwatch, Citrix, Fiberlink, Good, MobileIron and SAP Afaria) to protect our customers’ MDM investments. Cisco ISE further extends the reach of current MDM solutions into network enforcement and provides consistent, unified policy for not just mobile devices but all networked devices. Cisco ISE is an all-in-one enterprise control platform on-premise targeted for customers who demand scalable and complex network policy requirements. ISE provides one policy for the entire enterprise no matter what device, no matter what use case.

This winning combination delivers:

• Endpoint inventory and management
• Mobile endpoint posture assessment
• Consistent access policy and control enforced on the network
• Mobile application control
• Ability to detect not-enrolled BYOD devices on the network and force policy compliance
• Ability to conform to granular and dynamic policy attributes

“We chose the Cisco ISE because it delivered against our key business objectives of a single, simplified and secure solution,” says Brunel University, UK.

MDM as a Service Choice

Cisco also provides two service models to address large enterprise and mid-market customers. A cloud service secures and manages mobile devices enabling rapid deployment, flexibility to scale, and accelerated support for new devices — without initial capital investment.

Cisco Mobile Collaboration Management Service (MCMS ) is a cloud service to manage mobile collaboration devices, applications and content across multiple mobile platforms from a single web-based interface. This changes the game from basic MDM to a network-aware collaboration management platform with video and collaboration becoming the future of the mobile evolution.

New News! And the power of MDM & ISE continues. As noted earlier—Fiberlink is our newest partner to be integrated with the recently announced ISE 1.2 and MCMS will also be integrated.

Cisco Meraki Systems Manager is a cloud-managed MDM solution that enables administrators to manage and secure devices, deploy mobile applications, and manage inventory. Meraki provides out-of-the-box features that are easy to deploy and manage – ideal for organizations with a lean IT staff or many distributed sites. While Systems Manager offers rich integration with the Meraki wireless, switching, and security portfolios, Systems Manager is also offered as a free stand-alone service.

“Meraki is the only MDM platform that can provide unified visibility and management from the top of the network down to users’ devices,” said Andrew Ruginis, Director of IT a the Chicago Architecture Foundation. “If an organization is managing devices but has no such product like Systems Manager then I would say they are not really managing devices at all.”

Along with a solid comprehensive MDM approach to meet the customer needs, Cisco has a proven track record and solid vision for securing organizations. Cisco has a solution for almost any customer requirement. Nobody does it better… you choose!

Check out “Is your organization ready for secure mobile access?” (video)

UPDATE: Cisco TechWise Sheds More Light on MDM

Learn more from TechWiseTV’s Chief Geek, Jimmy Ray, on MDM and “…the match made in networking heaven….ISE & MDM”. Imagine what the power of device and network intelligence can do for you!

Networking 101-MDM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NwnI-kifIyQ
In the Lab – ISE and MDM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zduYf4H6Zb8