Case Study

Vehicle distribution company NVD needed a way to protect and secure hundreds of mobile devices for its growing workforce. Three’s mobile device management solution was the natural choice.

Transportation company NVD is the definition of a mobile business. It specialises in vehicle transport and storage with a fleet of trucks operating across the island of Ireland, the UK and mainland Europe. The family-owned company has operations at five sites around Ireland: Baldonnel, New Ross, Ringaskiddy, Rosslare and Dublin Port servicing the main Irish ports.

The company uses smartphones to provide drivers with delivery information, while staff at its workshops and compounds use tablets to access the company’s core IT system for their work.

These devices contain company information like email and apps. Many of them are assigned to drivers who often work across several territories. With NVD’s mobile workforce continuing to grow, security was becoming increasingly important. Although the phones and tablets don’t contain sensitive commercial information, the company wanted to follow good security practice by protecting them.

“We needed to ensure that all devices could be located and wiped if needed, and also only allow approved applications to be used on the devices,” explains Michael Howlin, the company’s Chief Technology Officer.

What’s more, the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) was a factor in the company’s thinking. New regulation obliges companies to maintain the privacy of any personally identifiable information. NVD doesn’t hold any such data on its staff devices, but as a quality-focused organisation with ISO certification, the company wanted to ensure its mobile security policies were in line with best practice.

“We chose to work with Three because of their customer service.”

Solution

NVD evaluated several Mobile Device Management (MDM) offerings. It ultimately chose Three, even though it wasn’t the company’s mobile provider at the time. “Most of the other products are similar in functionality. The reason we chose to work with Three is because of their customer service,” says Michael.

That was critical since the implementation was a cooperative process between NVD’s IT department, working side by side with Three’s project management team. At the start of the project, Three proposed a workshop session to outline the product’s capabilities and review use cases. “This was very beneficial and allowed us to see the full capability so there were no surprises after implementation,” says Michael.

Three’s team carried out an audit to fully understand NVD’s security requirements. It then recommended a carrier-agnostic mobile device management (MDM) solution to address those needs, streamline NVD’s current processes and help define best-practice policies for the company’s mobile device users.

The chosen MDM solution, Citrix XenMobile, gives role-based management, configuration and security of corporate and user-owned devices. NVD’s IT team can enrol and manage devices, blacklist or whitelist apps, and detect compromised or non-compliant devices. At the push of a button, NVD can remotely wipe any device that’s lost, stolen or non-compliant.

Another reason why NVD chose Three is that the MDM is delivered via the cloud. This means no investment in infrastructure was needed and it was fast to implement.

Results

NVD now has all 320 company mobile devices secured and manageable, addressing its data security concerns and GDPR requirements. Although the company is based in Ireland, its fleet operates across the UK and Europe, which presented the challenge of remotely pushing the MDM solution to devices not in the same location. Three’s Device Enrolment Services mean NVD is able to fully configure any company device remotely in minutes, without any IT involvement. In some cases, staff just enter their user ID and password, and their device is fully configured over the mobile network. This was an added benefit to NVD because it meant its IT team could focus on value-added tasks.

Michael describes Three’s customer service and technical expertise throughout the project as “excellent”.

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