Education Leader and Innovator Leaps Ahead on Mobile with Citrix XenMobile MDM

LeapFrog Enterprises, Inc. is the leader in educational entertainment for children. LeapFrog’s award-winning product portfolio is designed to help every child achieve his or her potential by delivering best-in-class learning solutions through engaging content, age-appropriate technology-based platforms, and learning toys.

Founded in 1995 by a father who revolutionized technology-based learning solutions to help his son learn to read, LeapFrog products are available in more than 45 countries and are used by teachers in more than 100,000 U.S. classrooms. Having won more than 1,200 education and parenting awards since inception, LeapFrog’s mission is to help children achieve their potential.

LeapFrog’s technology leadership extends beyond its product line to the entire company, so when employees began using mobile devices to access corporate email, the Information Technology team wanted to help them do it. But as a public company with international operations and collaboration across lines of business, users having access to and sharing business information from their mobile devices also meant potential exposure of sensitive corporate data. Spearheading the effort to help users go mobile while also protecting corporate data was systems administrator, Ali Khan.

The challenge: Secure mobile communication

Like many organizations, LeapFrog started out with a small test group of mobile users accessing the corporate network, primarily to get email on their devices. “When it was a smaller group, we could manage it through Exchange ActiveSync,” explains Khan. “But as an increasing number of our employees accessed the network via their mobile devices, it not only became a management challenge, but also a security issue.”

Khan notes that employees have access to proprietary company data within email. “Our job as an IT department is to make sure that all data is secured. If an employee loses his or her device, we need to be able to locate the device and wipe it clean of corporate information.” Khan also mentions that in some cases it’s necessary to remove corporate data from a user’s device while leaving personal data intact. “People have pictures and phone numbers on those devices, and when they leave the company, we want to be able to selectively wipe the corporate data but leave their personal stuff alone.”

Based on the company’s device management needs and data security concerns, Khan and team pulled together LeapFrog’s requirements for a mobile device management (MDM) solution:

• Multi-device. LeapFrog’s enterprise mobility deployment is approximately 70 percent corporate-issued and 30 percent “bring your own device” (BYOD). As more users bring their own devices into work, the BYOD proportion is growing. Khan and team knew they needed superior support not just for Apple devices, which made up the bulk of corporate-issued devices, but for the many flavors of user-owned Androids that were showing up on the network.
• Data protection. Because users have access to proprietary company data from their mobile devices, Khan and the team needed a way to take action quickly if a user lost his or her device. Beyond loss and theft, Khan points out other data protection use cases, such as locking down near-field communications in Samsung SAFE devices, blacklisting apps, and using multiple detection mechanisms to identify and take action against jailbroken devices.
• Support for apps. LeapFrog’s mobile use case today centers around making email available to mobile users. But Khan and team intend to roll out apps in the near-term, including WebEx, LeapFrog’s own mobile apps, mobile access to SharePoint, and ultimately, mobile access to the company’s ERP system.
  

The solution: XenMobile MDM helps IT manage BYOD and corporate devices while protecting data

After evaluating multiple mobile solutions, Khan and the LeapFrog team chose Citrix as the company’s MDM partner. Notes Khan, “We evaluated a number of different MDM vendors and did proofs-of-concept with nearly all of them. But when it came time to make a decision, I presented Citrix and everyone agreed. We didn’t even have to take a vote. Citrix fit our needs for the whole nine yards.” Some of the factors that contributed to their decision included:

• Ease-of-use. Khan and team felt that Citrix was easy to understand and use. “Everybody liked the look of the console,” says Khan. “It was user-friendly. I knew I wasn’t going to have to train my help desk and that was important.”
• Direct integration with Microsoft Active Directory. Related to ease-of-use is integration with corporate user directories. Continues Khan, “Because we have a large number of employees, it was important for us to integrate directly with our enterprise directory and enroll them automatically. It would have been ridiculous to manually create individual accounts.”
• Security. In order to get unmanaged devices under control and manage mobile access, Khan chose Citrix for its security. “I needed to be able to block non-compliant users, such as if the device is rooted or jailbroken. I also wanted to be able to do things like enforce a blacklist and take advantage of some of the new Samsung SAFE capabilities.”
• Android support. “One of the things I realized early on in the process,” continues Khan, “was that when it came to iOS, all the vendors did the same things. But Citrix really stood out on Android. We have several Android-based devices, some of them overseas that are not available in the U.S. We needed to be able to manage and protect them too, and the Citrix Android support exceeded the others’ options.”
  

The result: A proactive, future-proof enterprise mobility program

Following the decision to go with Citrix, Khan engaged Citrix professional services to help his team deploy the system and policies quickly. “Your consultant helped us with the install and made it much easier to get everything set up without having to go through a test phase.”

The program was quickly and systematically put in place. Once announced, the program was simple for users to enroll. They created three baseline profiles – one for executive management, management, and end users. “A lot of folks travel to Asia and Europe,” explains Khan. “We wanted them to be able to connect automatically to WiFi and let some of them connect to the VPN for remote desktop access, so we created customized profiles on top of the baselines for those individuals.”

Going forward, LeapFrog plans to deploy a set of productivity and business apps for streamlined communications, teaching, and testing, and get even more proactive about managing and securing devices with more sophisticated security policies and compliance enforcement. Citrix looks forward to helping make those mobility initiatives a reality.