BlueFletch
Smart Solutions to Manage Shared Enterprise Android Devices

In March 2020, when the World Health Organization announced Covid-19 as a pandemic and the US government declared a nation-wide lockdown, businesses needed to adapt to the changed scenario quickly. In a short period of time, they had to implement solutions that would keep their employees and customers safe and their doors open for business. With these new paradigms came an increased reliance on rugged mobile devices to optimize business operations. One of the historical shortcomings of mobile devices used in the enterprise has been poor login experience and lack of Single Sign-On (SSO). Login experience issues on shared Android devices needed to be solved. BlueFletch, a mobile software company out of Atlanta, GA, delivered a solution that has become widely adopted across industries to solve these issues.

Having spent the last decade building and deploying Android solutions for large enterprises, BlueFletch is moving the needle with its software toolset, Enterprise Mobile Security (EMS). "Business should have control over devices from a security standpoint without affecting employees’ user experience" says Richard Makerson, CEO of BlueFletch. "Subsequently, we have focused our toolset on helping secure, manage, and support these company-owned Android devices."

EMS is an all-in-one software toolset designed to increase an organization's user and device-level security posture while also improving the login experience for employees on Android devices. The EMS toolset provides solutions for login and authentication, user and device compliance, and device lockdown and recovery.

EMS's core feature is the BlueFletch Enterprise Launcher, a customizable secure home screen replacement for dedicated Android devices that ties into all Identity Providers and provides seamless SSO to all applications.

The BlueFletch Enterprise Launcher locks down the device and enables role-based application access. With secure SSO, it solves login inefficiencies by allowing employees to quickly authenticate to their business apps without having to re-type passwords. It also safeguards company devices and data with configurable smart logout rules, secure notifications, and a built-in Device Finder to keep devices from going missing.

Business should have control over devices from a security standpoint without affecting employees’ user experience

Another critical feature of EMS is the BlueFletch Support Agent—an on-device service that collects actionable data to helps businesses improve visibility into their rugged Android fleet. It offers granular device-specific data, including software usage, network details, application information, battery health, and operating system information. It works in tandem with the Enterprise Launcher to collect user-level login and logout details. By leveraging this check-in/check-out data, managers can see which employees currently have devices and when they last used them, thus creating device accountability. "This plays a vital role in preventing lost devices," adds Makerson.

A third component of the EMS is BlueFletch Enterprise Installer, an Android-focused Enterprise Mobility Management tool (EMM) that leverages Google's cloud infrastructure for security, scale, and consistency. "We are a Google validated EMM, so we can manage any Android device that's out there," Makerson asserts. More importantly, all these tools are built from the ground up on the concept of Zero Trust—ensuring the security of devices from bad actors.

With such a comprehensive solution, the BlueFletch EMS toolset has been leveraged by many large enterprises that have rolled out Android devices over the last few years. One example is a textile retailer headquartered in Georgia. They were losing hundreds of devices each year. This posed several problems, including exposure of company data, financial impact (rugged devices costs $500-$2000), employee downtime, and potential exposure to a network breach. By leveraging the BlueFletch EMS toolset, the company created device accountability and significantly reduced the number of lost devices.

In another case, a large grocery chain used BlueFletch EMS to add an additional layer of security to their existing Mobile Device Management (MDM) system. The client had converted all their legacy applications to Android, but they didn't have an SSO process. The company leveraged the BlueFletch Launcher to support their custom applications with SSO. As a result, the store employees could log in and start using all apps within a few seconds, which improved app adoption and productivity.

Driven by many such instances of client success, BlueFletch is continuing to grow its offerings by leveraging machine learning and AI to drive security and user experience improvements. "One of our core values is to solve our customers' toughest problems while delivering an awesome end-user experience. We will continue to evolve our EMS toolset to help enterprises solve the problem of ever-increasing security threats," concludes Makerson.