All posts by Kit Livingston

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How this Regional Fast Food Chain Encouraged Employee Productivity

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A regional fast-food chain installed cellular-based routers that provided WWAN connectivity intended only for business email, VoIP calling, and point-of-sale transactions. However, employees were logging on to the network for social media and video streaming.

Cause
The chain’s IT department could not analyze and control cellular data usage on these routers, even though they had cellular connectivity.

Solution
MobilSentry™’s Data Manager function allowed the organization to block access to entire categories of websites, including social media and audio and video streaming. Meanwhile, business traffic remains free to traverse the network. With protections in place, IT staff are buying significantly smaller data plans. No company should have to pay for its employee’s online entertainment.

Click here to learn how MobilSense can protect your company’s data usage.

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Digital Lifestyle Revolution and the Impact on Cellular Usage

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While the digital lifestyle has made an immense contribution to every area of both our personal and professional lives, it has an insatiable appetite for mobile data. Tools to curb the cost of growing data use are now more critical than ever before.

Today’s Expense Management is Focused on Symptoms not Causes
Smart companies have been quick to employ mitigation techniques to minimize data overage charges while other companies have been caught off-guard. Expense management tools offer ways to treat the symptoms by shifting high users to unlimited plans and resizing data pools; however, they are not effective at addressing the root cause, video streaming.

Focusing on the Root Cause
With accelerating trends of data usage, it is no longer enough to only perform cost-avoidance optimization. Establishing policy boundaries to trigger automated text alerts when data usage exceeds company-established thresholds are part of the new Data Management solution capabilities proactive companies are deploying. Data management solutions provide insight into individual device usage by site, time, and quantity used. These tools are revealing up to 70% of business mobile usage is consumed on personal video streaming.

MobilSentry™ Data Manager is the most advanced enterprise mobility management solution for understanding and controlling mobile data usage. It helps companies gain complete visibility of data usage incurred on employee-liable handsets and enforces company usage policies through intelligent, real-time alerts and data controls.

Click here to download Mobilsense’s white paper, The Digital Lifestyle Revolution, A Collision Course with Company Cost-controlled Initiatives.

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How this Oil & Gas Company Protects its Cellular Assets from Hackers

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An oil and gas company used routers embedded with SIM cards on pipelines throughout Texas and Oklahoma. These routers provided cellular data access to sensors on pipelines. Suddenly, data usage on the endpoints increased from the usual 50MB per month to 50GB per month, per router.

Cause

The IT staff had been using carrier-provided, public static IP addresses, which are accessible on the Internet. Hackers found those addresses and launched DDOS attacks on the routers.

Solution

MobilSentry was able, via white-listing capability, to limit access to a loT device to a small set or even a single IP address for communication. Choosing private addresses, rather than public, is a common-sense action but it wasn’t enough. The solution lies in the ability to limit access to a finite list of IP addresses, thereby preventing malicious access.

MobilSense assigned private IP addresses to the routers, and the oil and gas company now tracks the routers via MobilSentry™. Real-time analytics offer insight into data usage and MobilSentry™ sends alerts if any router surpasses usage thresholds. The platform allows the organization to blacklist and whitelist routers as needed, which has led to reduced data costs and improved security measures.

To learn more about how real-time analytics can offer insight into your company’s data usage, click here.