What we know  

Davie is working with a customer who needs to balance strong security controls with a user-friendly mobile BYOD program. This customer wants to protect sensitive data, apply DLP rules, and ensure that enterprise applications are available to their employees. Other solutions they explored forced too many trade-offs: either requiring too much intrusion into the employee’s personal device, or creating a cumbersome interface that isn’t optimized for a mobile device screen.

What we learned

A common approach for mobile BYOD programs is to use a mobile device management (MDM) solution. The challenge with this approach is that it requires a device enrollment workflow that’s unfamiliar to users and requires that employees allow management of their personal device — including the ability to wipe their device, inspect the installed apps, or route all network traffic through a proxy. For privacy-conscious employees, this is often a bridge too far.

The other approach this customer explored as desktop virtualization. Many VDI platforms offer a mobile interface, but the user experience is generally poor. Rendering virtualized applications on a tablet-sized screen may work for some use cases, but doing that on a phone is a stretch.

When this customer met with Davie and saw Island, the Enterprise Browser, they immediately saw the potential for their BYOD program.

What happened next

With the Enterprise Browser available on both iOS and Android app stores, every employee can easily install the app with the same familiar workflow they’re accustomed to. Once launched, they authenticate with their enterprise identity and can access all the apps provisioned to them. When they’re done with their work tasks, they simply switch apps to their consumer browser of choice. Unlike an MDM solution, Island doesn’t require any device-level configurations so their personal devices remain personal. When an employee leaves the organization, they simply delete the Island app and there’s nothing left behind on their device.

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Island has been fortunate in so many respects, especially at this early stage of our life as a company. To us, that good fortune isn’t just a positive outcome of our past efforts, but a responsibility for the future. To take some of that success, and turn it outwards by improving the communities and the world around us. 

In that light, we’ve made certain commitments regarding our carbon footprint.

We’re still a small organization - so our impact at this stage may not be gigantic. But we feel every step in the right direction is an important one. It’s a way for us to use whatever resources we have to better the world around us - no matter how big or small.

Our first initiative is to commit to making our products carbon neutral. To do that, we are partnering with a carbon offset provider as well as contributing to key emission-reduction projects. 

And we’re happy to be able to say that this is our second year in a row we’ve offset our carbon emissions!

Here are the initiatives we are participating in to make these offsets possible:

• Home on the Range – This project protects native grasslands across the Great Plains. By protecting this land from conversion to agriculture, millions of tonnes of CO2 are stored in the grass and the soil.
  
  
• Where the Buffalo Roam – The Southern Plains Land Trust purchases land for prairie wildlife. So far, it has protected over 56,000 acres in the preserve network, providing urgently needed refuge to a wide variety of native grassland animals and plants. Piece by piece, it is restoring the American Serengeti.
  
  
• Seeing the Forest for the Trees -- This small community-based Improved Forestry Management project encourages residents to preserve and grow the biomass in their standing forests despite multiple opportunities to cut trees for profit or for increased grazing opportunities.

But it goes further than our product itself. Island also offsets the heavy footprint coming from the hardware and compute-intensive products and services we displace such as desktop virtualization and traffic backhauling technologies. A difference that amounts to something quite significant. This is good for Island, good for businesses everywhere, and great for society as a whole. 

This small but significant step is exciting - but it’s just the starting point. From here, we’ll actively seek other ways we can make things better for the people and the world around us.

What we know

Tim is working with a retailer based in the Pacific Northwest. One of their challenges is related to handling customer credit card data when they need to process refunds. The legacy payment platform they’re using requires an employee to scroll through a list of transactions to find the charge that needs to be refunded — showing too much information in the process. Rewriting that application wasn’t an option, so they turned to Island to see how we could help mask the credit cards within the web interface.

What we learned

This is a common challenge that Island, the Enterprise Browser, is perfectly positioned to solve. Many organizations have web applications that disclose more information than necessary to a user: credit card numbers, email addresses, or social security numbers, as a few examples. With Island, it’s easy to add a data masking rule that hides the sensitive information from view, with the option to reveal one record at a time as needed. Because it’s applying this masking locally in the browser, there’s no dependency on the backend systems and no code changes required — especially helpful for legacy applications that are difficult or impossible to modify.

What happened next

Tim helped this customer create a policy that obfuscates credit card numbers while leaving the last four digits visible for easy identification. The store managers now have a much improved workflow that allows them to find and issue refunds quickly without displaying every credit card number on the screen. This had been a thorny problem that their other security tools simply couldn’t resolve, until they found the Enterprise Browser. Along the way, Tim helped address several other challenges relating to safe browsing and content filtering and even found a way to open internet access for employees during their break time, while limiting distractions within the store. This is another great example of using the Enterprise Browser to improve the end-user experience while safeguarding sensitive business data.