Mobile target for the public sector
The London Borough of Brent is rolling out mobile device management that it believes will address the need for cost-effectiveness against a BYOD background.
The outer London Borough of Brent recently decided to equip more of its employees, particularly field workers, with mobile devices that will help it raise its game across all its public services divisions, including social welfare, leisure, waste, transport and education. This needed to be done securely, yet be cost-effective and easy to manage - no matter where case workers travel in the Brent Council area's 16.7 square miles to serve its 311,200 residents.
Stephan Conaway, chief information officer at Brent Council, said in a prepared statement that he had his own views on how this should be achieved and made his plans accordingly. When Conaway was hired by the council, the borough was already considering buying tablets for many of its staff, with a view to increasing their productivity whether they were working on site or out of the office.
"I have never agreed with the ‘lockdown' approach, where IT buys expensive mobile devices for employees and then renders them close to useless by imposing needless, rigid security," he said. "I wanted to use a lighter touch that would focus on supporting user productivity while maintaining the required security levels."
Conaway said the borough wanted to leave the mobile devices as they had been built, and make the best use of them, but also be able to track them while ensuring PINs and essential security configurations were used across a potential fleet of 3,000 new devices using the Apple iOS or Google Android platform - replacing the current corporate-owned BlackBerrys. The borough wanted to be able to delete data remotely, in the event of any of the devices being lost or stolen.
The Brent IT team members knew they wanted a mobile device management (MDM) offering, but did not know which one. In the end, they examined two with contrasting approaches, and chose to work with Newbury-based MDM and Wi-Fi networking integrator Qolcom, which offers, among other things, MDM software from MobileIron.
Brent's IT strategy for 2010-2013 has focused on supporting its customer service plans; enabling the council to meet financial challenges for the next three years; and supporting its move to the new Civic Centre next year, while improving the quality and management of council information. All this has to be done despite ongoing financial constraints.
Conaway said one of the important factors in this implementation was whether the technology required the creation of a "private envelope" on the user's mobile device.
"Brent found that they [users] could not use their device-native applications while in a restricted envelope, and felt the approach was far too restrictive for its workforce. MobileIron's approach was seen as more open and allowed Brent employees to get much more use out of the mobile devices' native services," Conaway said.
MDM offers public sector advantage
Keith Reading, director of Qolcom, says his company had not done any work for the London Borough of Brent before but has been notching up increasing numbers of related public sector deals in areas including Leeds, Scarborough, Stirling and Orkney. Demand for local government staff to have greater mobility at work is rising, he suggests.
"I believe they had read about the work we have done at Leeds City Council, where we rolled out MobileIron in Leeds, which I think was about 1,000 devices," he says.
Leeds was still using Windows 6.5 machines, and could not get any more without resorting to buying them on an ad hoc basis from eBay or similar, necessitating a major technology refresh.
"What we have done at Brent is straightforward. They wanted to employ mobile devices for corporate users and in future for BYOD. They used a model corporate policy, with a six-PIN code and also ActiveSync control," Reading says.
The MDM deployment kicked off about six months ago, and is now in full production. Policies can be varied by individual, harnessing the use of a virtually unlimited number of labels. This means security using the MobileIron application is very customisable and responsive to changing needs, as well as quick and easy to administer the standard adds, moves and changes, he says.
"The system is run centrally from a virtual smartphone platform (VSP), so that goes for device registration and command-and-control of ActiveSync and email access," says Reading. "It is zero-touch for IT in terms of configuring devices. We have a portal that we deliver to users, where they can self-register."
He notes that Qolcom has other customers who have deployed the same MDM system across thousands of devices, and they have not needed to add any helpdesk staff to manage it - representing a considerable saving for the customer.
Two hundred iOS devices were deployed to get the project started, and within a year, about 3,000 new iOS and Android tablets and phones are expected to be online. Many are anticipated to be Apple devices, which are more homogeneous in the OS and thus in principle easier to manage.
"With Android, there are 2,500 variations in product out there, and every product we see has a different flavour," notes Reading. "And where they [users] want to use their own devices, primarily that is Apple."
Mobile device users simply download the software before connecting with the borough's network. Policies are enforced on each device, and if the device no longer complies with policy, access is denied. This is all managed from a centralised server. Another feature of the implementation is an apps market that can push third-party software through to end-point devices.
However, no additional apps are needed to get MobileIron up and running, beyond the VMware on which the ISO images sit. "Right now, you need a VPN to get access to SharePoint, but by the end of this year, we will be moving through the Sentry [mobile command centre]," he says.
Reading adds that Qolcom has also been contracted to go on providing support - the deal does not end with the initial successful implementation. "We are providing helpdesk, consultancy, ongoing development and upgrades and so on," he confirms.
The public sector is an area for "massive growth" for Qolcom, with the integrator not having seen any slowdown in spite of cuts and tough times in the economy.
"We have probably got another three clients in the past few weeks, so it is ongoing," Reading says.
Brent's Conaway thinks staff are already seeing productivity gains as a result of the deployment - in part because the council can now provision the right mobile device for the right person at the right time, and because the new devices are more convenient to carry around.
"We previously tried to have case workers carry laptops with them, but we found that approach was not right for many frontline workers," he claimed. "Already many employees are using iPads to send and receive email as well as to access and read documents, hold paperless meetings and take notes in the field - but managing this is only a fraction of what MobileIron can do."
Conaway said that hundreds of new mobile devices and apps are expected to be added to Brent's network from year one. However, he had faith that the granularity of the MobileIron application offers some degree of future-proofing.
"If we ever need to step up to more stringent levels of security, we can do that with the flick of a switch," Conaway said in his statement. "It worked well right out of the box and is easy to manage. It certainly has not created any extra work or issues for our IT staff."
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