Governments Deploy Mobile Content Management
Napa County, Calif., has seen the future of mobility and understands it’s all about moving content securely across the network for users.
The percentage of organizations that push apps to their employees who are using customized applications
SOURCE: Fiberlink, “MaaS360 Mobile Metrics,” May 2014
The county uses Good Technology’s Good for Enterprise container to secure data for a broad range of county workers, says Gary Coverdale, assistant CIO and chief information security officer. Roughly 500 mobile users have mobile device management (MDM) technology installed on their devices, and that number will rise to 700 as Napa County migrates away from BlackBerry devices. About half of the staff use their personal devices.
Everyone from law enforcement to health and human services workers to public works employees store documents, email messages and other data in the Good container and has access to them on mobile devices. “We like it because the data in the container is secured with 256-bit encryption,” Coverdale says. “If a device is lost or stolen, we typically just wipe the container data, although with encryption, it’s a safe harbor even without the wipe command.”
Chris Silva, research director for mobile and client computing for Gartner, says state and local governments will increasingly integrate content management into their MDM environments. “Only 20 to 30 percent of the organizations go beyond basic MDM, but that will change as the people closest to the day-to-day work demand that secure document management is integrated into workflows so they can run the apps on mobile devices,” he says.
Secure Docs in Fremont
Marilyn Crane, information technology services director for the city of Fremont, Calif., says the city has recently purchased 500 licenses for MobileIron’s MDM system and its Docs@Work content management technology.
Fremont initially rolled MobileIron out on 220 police department devices, then followed with a deployment to the fire department.
“For now, we are installing MobileIron only on city-owned devices, but we plan to do BYOD as well,” Crane says. “With the full suite from MobileIron, our police officers can access applications and documents from the state Justice Department on their mobile devices and know they are secure.”
