BoxTone Advances its Mobile Device Management

BoxTone, a start-up based in Columbia, Maryland, released a major upgrade to its Mobile Service Management (MSM) platform, which helps enterprises to activate, secure and manage their smartphones, tablets and applications.


BoxTone 6, which supports BlackBerry, iPhone, iPad, Android, Android Tablets, Windows Mobile/Phone 7 and Symbian devices, adds a real-time compliance engine with automated workflow capabilities. The company said its strategic differentiator in the mobile device management (MDM) space is its ability to enable IT security, operations and service desk staff to continuously monitor for – and automatically neutralize – threats that can arise when mobile users and devices intentionally or unintentionally do not comply with enterprise mobile security policies. The company said its software integrates with existing help desk software, enabling IT staff to disable user access across all enterprise systems, including smart phone and tablets, should a security threat be detected or if the employee leaves the firm.


BoxTone now more than 800,000 devices under management and claims 40 of the Fortune 100 as customers.



The new BoxTone 6 compliance engine adds:


Real-Time Compliance Monitoring: Continuous collection and analysis of information across the end-to-end mobile service; delivering a comprehensive, real-time view and automated enforcement of mobile compliance. The critical security and policy data includes both device-level information (hardware, software, applications, configuration profiles and security policies), as well as current enterprise security policies and system configuration for authorization of each user, their device(s), the services they access, and their Active Directory (AD) profile.


Real-Time Compliance Enforcement: Leverages rapid identification of enterprise security policy changes or compliance violations and automatically takes rules-based actions to protect the user and the enterprise. Enforcement actions can include directly changing the mobile devices' configuration or security settings to align with policy changes, cutting off the user's device from enterprise access, and/or selectively wiping corporate data.


Real-Time Compliance Alerts: Automatic notification of all enforcement actions with details on changes, violations, actions, and recommendations to all relevant stakeholders in Operations, Security and Service Desk teams.


Compliance Auditing and Reporting: A complete and detailed audit trail of compliance information to satisfy legal, corporate and regulatory auditing requirements. These reports can be scheduled or generated-on-demand reporting, with automatic distribution to key compliance stakeholders and automatic archiving in the BoxTone data warehouse. All compliance activity is fully logged, and includes information on users and devices that have been activated, changed, deactivated or wiped; full configuration and change history for all devices; applications installed/de-installed; and what corporate resources have been accessed and used.


Enhanced Service Desk Support: BoxTone's Service Desk module is already proven to automate support across the most comprehensive set of mobile devices, applications and platforms; enabling faster first-call resolution (FCR), shortened mean time to resolution (MTTR), and fewer support escalations. The new capabilities in BoxTone 6 mean Level 1 to Level 3 support staff can now access real-time compliance information from within the Service Desk console along with recommended actions and a "1-click Fix-It" system to address any service issue and keep mobile users productive.
http://www.boxtone.com