Welcome to another episode of unraveling IT. On this episode, we’ll be sitting down with Brian Harmon, and the CEO of Corska Technologies, as well as Nate Trauer, solutions architect here at Corska Technologies. And we’ll be talking about mobile device management versus mobile application management, and which solution we feel is best for your business? Stay tuned. So today, I’m here with Nate Troyer, who is a solutions engineer and, has been introduced in past podcasts. Nate, thanks for joining us. Again today. Yeah. No problem. I’m excited to talk about a topic that is not a new topic, but is certainly one that comes up a lot as we work with new customers, especially. And that’s around what do we do with all these mobile devices Right. In our environment. So, would love to hear a little bit about maybe the way, mobile devices used to be managed I I remember days of people carrying, you know, four or five cell phones. Right. Or or at least two. Let’s let’s roll back to what the, the early two thousands where the proliferation of laptops were was really starting to to catch on. Right? And so, Man, were was I? I wasn’t I wasn’t fully out of high school yet, but, when laptops were invented, you’re saying? I feel like they’ve been around for a while. Yeah. But, I mean, when they were really, really started, you know, picking up speed, people buying them, corporations kinda moving away from work stations and moving more into laptops. And and I feel like a lot of that was driven by the capability of being able to not have it be a boat anchor. Right. Right. You know, wireless I mean, I remember working at Best Buy and and wireless was just really starting to take off. And, you know, it just became the de facto thing people came in and want it. They they were like, oh, you know, I could get a I could get a boat anchor that sits on my desk, or I could, you know, I could have a laptop. So you have a bunch of system administrators out there who are trying to figure like, how do I manage these devices when they’re not here? You know? And there was a lot of, there, you know, the essentially around two thousand one, we had the first real MDM solution come out. I’m sure someone in the comments will say I’m wrong. But I looked it up. So and Wikipedia is never wrong. Wow. That’s the great thing about Wikipedia. So, so, essentially, You know, you had your MDM solution, which is, which is, you know, almost complete control of the device. You know, enterprises would would would do that because it’s was their devices. Right? You know? Fast forward to, around two thousand five, six, seven, around in there, you know, and the whole bring your own device thing, which I remember you talking about a lot when, you know, earlier on in my career. So what, like, talk us through what bring your own device really is. Yeah. The and it it did start with with laptops. But more mobile phones once the smartphone really took over. And people wanna be able to access their work stuff from their own devices, or you have companies that that don’t wanna buy laptops kinda take the mechanic model, which is, you know, you have your own tools to do the job. And a company started losing control of where does our data live? How do I know that that person’s working? And how how do I if they decide tomorrow that they won the lottery and they don’t wanna work here anymore. How do I make sure that I can get my data back and they can’t still send company emails and that kind of thing. So that that really is is kind of the the start of you know, we need to manage these mobile devices. I I feel like pretty quickly laptops and desktops were were easily under control Mhmm. If they were out of the the office or out of the building because those those capabilities started being built into the OS to be able to manage where these devices are. Device started having GPS in them, you know, ten years ago. So we we knew that. And it started to shift more now into most workers when they’re not in front of their computer are in front of their phone. Right. Right. So, you know, around around the, you know, mid the mid twenty tens, I think, was, like, around in there. We started to see, Essentially, since you since mobile device management requires that the person that might be their personal device basically sign up to have their device completely controlled by their boss. Potentially deleted. Yeah. Potentially deleted. Whatever. You know, a lot of people were kinda skittish about that. They’re like, I don’t really know if I want wanna do that. So the middle ground and really cool way of of solving that problem was m a m, where Now we’re now we’re essentially managing the applications and our data on your device. We’re not managing your entire device, just the data and the application So that takes care of the horror story of, you know, I got sideways with my employer and they erased all my family photos off my phone. Right. Right. Did that happen? Oh, that’s happened many times. The stories I could tell no. I’ve never done that. I wouldn’t do that. I’m like no. But I I consorting with an unfriend or My guess is my guess is that that we both know people that have had that happen. Sometimes even accidentally, his all all it would take is an administrator accidentally. And we do know IT people make mistakes Yep. Occasionally. Accidentally clearing the wrong device, thinking they’re resetting a company owned device, but instead it’s an employee owned device and poof everything is gone. Right? Right? And MAM is a way of essentially, like, I I think it’s actually pretty cool because you can set policies and things like that so that, you know, you’re you’re essentially making a container inside that device and you’re putting all of your data inside of that container. So only other applications are inside of that container can share that information. Like, I think one of the one of the big security risks, for a while, since people are bringing their phones everywhere and their phones have this to their email is what if I have sensitive information in the email and you copy the text out of there and throw it into a, text message to somebody else? You can stop that now. You can actually stop that now. Right. And and that’s the way we would typically recommend mobile application management happen. In fact, you know, we we typically don’t recommend mobile device management because that generally leads back to the well, then I want a company phone. I want my personal phone. And the whole point of having a mobile device is that it’s convenient. It’s easy to use. I’ve got one interface to get to my work and my personal you know, that’s a double edged sword. It it’s hard to get away from work. But at the same time, I think most of us appreciate the convenience of I can handle the urgent things without having to, you know, run back to a a home, a coffee shop, wherever it is. Pull out a laptop and and work. I know for me, it’s changed the way I can handle vacations and other things and be confident that that things are going well and that that people can get a hold of me. So, you know, I’d say if you’re an organization, you have employees carrying around a company phone, and a personal device. Not only are you wasting money on the company phone, you’re likely not getting the value that you hope you are out of having that person be connected to work when they’re away from their desk. So what I already know the answer to this question, but what are some of the solutions that have MDM and MAM built into them? Yeah. Intune is is the most prevalent, and it’s certainly the one that we would recommend. And it it fits into the Microsoft ecosystem much along the the line of what you’ll hear from us a lot is it it makes sense now. To not try and pick eight different best breed products, but to to really go after a a stack of tools that’s consistent and that that interfaces with the rest of the ecosystem that you use everywhere else. So we would we would lean towards Microsoft Intune. That’s what we use internally, we use it both on our laptops as well as, you know, employee own devices. So we don’t supply any company cell phones anymore. We did five years ago. But the way we use it is we containerize the the company data. If somebody leaves, we can clear that part out. They can uninstall the apps and it really leaves no, you know, fingerprints that that we were there. And at the same time, it protects the company data and that individual, because it’s not when somebody leaves, people lose their phones. Right? They’re in an airport. They lose their phone. They lose their laptop. Those are the the scenarios where where we can help as well. We can’t read text messages. We can’t, you know, track people, any of that kind of stuff. But it it does give full access to everything that that they need from OneDrive SharePoint, email, shared files, all that kind of stuff without without having to expose the company to risk or tell them to carry around another, you know, mini computer in pocket. Yeah. I I’m glad that we moved away from that because it was always like, okay. I have my phone. Where’s my company phone? You know, and I just I don’t like them that. That’s I think most people don’t. Yeah. So it’s it’s definitely in the future. Right? I and and the future is here. It’s been here for a couple of years, but we still see companies that are nervous about, well, how do I have total control. And the the answer is we don’t have total control over anything. Right. What we want to have is we wanna have reasonable controls in place And then we wanna trust people to to be educated, do the right thing, and still protect the company and those individuals in the case that somebody makes a mistake. And And m a m really checks all of those boxes. Yep. Yep. Alright. Well, Nate, thanks for joining me again. Today. You talked most of this time. Or maybe I joined you. We’ll find out. I guess either way, Thanks for your expertise. Appreciate the conversation. And look forward to chatting again soon. Okay. Okay. So are you gonna do the introduction? Or Yeah. I’m going to. Alright. Welcome back. Leave it in. You you can use our outtakes. It seems like only yesterday that I was wearing a different vest. Today, you’re wearing my vest. That’s not true. That’s true. Yeah. That’s
