Harishanker Kannan, Scalefusion: “as the boundaries of work and personal lives start blending, the risk increases”

With so many devices these days, having a clear view of the full attack surface is no longer an option but a necessity.

Regardless of the industry, lately, there has been an increase in the use of mobile devices in the workplace. And while having the technology easily available makes jobs easier for millions of people, the use of unmanaged mobile applications and insecure public networks can cause serious consequences for companies.

To discuss the best practices companies should take to eliminate mobile risks, we invited Harishanker Kannan, the CEO and Co-Founder of Scalefusion – a mobile device and endpoint management platform helping enterprises keep their ever-growing numbers of devices under control.

Would you like to share a little bit about your story? How did Scalefusion come about in 2015?

The journey of Scalefusion (then known as Mobilock Pro) started in 2014. It grew up to become a full-blown device & endpoint management solution from a basic Android kiosk-based locking application. Initially, we launched a standalone free app for Android on Google Playstore to test the market. After realizing the demand for the product, we developed a dashboard that gives a 360-degree view of the entire device inventory along with a paid version of the product. Our vision was to make mobile devices and endpoint management very simple. We succeeded in that, and that’s how we position ourselves now, an MDM solution that eliminates complexities from your device management journey.

From being an SMB-focussed product mainly catering to the Android device management market, we gradually scaled into offering MDM capabilities for iOS, macOS, and Windows 10 management. We pivoted from being an Android and SMB-centric solution to being a full-blown MDM solution that found its suitability beyond SMBs to larger businesses.

The rest, as they say, is history.

Can you introduce us to your device management solutions? What are the main challenges you help navigate?

Our flagship product for device and endpoint management is Scalefusion. It is an intuitive and powerful platform that provides end-to-end security and management of enterprise endpoints including smartphones, tablets, laptops, rugged devices, POS, and digital signages. Our platform extends support to various deployment scenarios such as dedicated/fully-managed devices, COPE (Corporate-owned, Personally Enabled) devices, and BYOD (Bring Your Own Device). We always wanted this product to be simple, a solution that is easy to use and that removes the complexities of handling mobile devices. So, we created a dashboard that is clutter-free. One can have a ubiquitous view of the entire device inventory with Scalefusion which makes day-to-day operations easy and effortless for every business. Apart from this, we have a strong & responsive customer success and support team to ensure that our customers are accompanied by our experts, throughout their stint with us, irrespective of the length of it. We offer Android device management, Rugged device management, and Kiosk Lockdown Software for Android, IoS, macOS, and Windows 10.

Scalefusion tackles challenges of security threats and vulnerabilities associated with mobile devices. It enables remote troubleshooting and helps reduce data usage costs and distractions. Ultimately, this enhances data security as well as employee productivity in an organization.

What would you consider the most serious threats surrounding mobile devices nowadays?

There is an upsurge in the use of mobile devices in the workplace – irrespective of the industry. The most serious threats that surround mobile devices in an enterprise environment come from different sources like unknown/non-trusted mobile applications, webpages, network threats, and physical device security threats. Moreover, there is a flourishing trend of BYOD at organizations, that further increases security risks to be taken care of. That’s where Scalefusion comes up as a solution!

How did the recent global events affect your field of work? Did you add any new features?

In the year 2020, almost all the companies across the globe had to move to remote operations, and there was a boom in remote working. Since most of the devices were windows compatible, it gave us a deep and quick penetration into the market and established a stronger presence for Scalefusion. From then on, we have kept on adding more capabilities to make Scalefusion more robust and industry agnostic. We introduced more and more Windows-centric capabilities within the Scalefusion dashboard to meet the demands of managing work and school PCs running on Windows 10.

Remote working opened up new avenues for us into diverse industries such as healthcare, retail, logistics, and education. Also, the culture of BYOD thrived and that helped us gain more traction for the product. The most sought-after feature was Remote Troubleshooting. We capitalized on it and further elaborated on our feature base to remain a step ahead of our competitors and extended our offering to multiple OS- Android, iOS, Windows 10, and macOS.

We nurtured more than 22 OEM partnerships and increased our geographical footprint across 120 countries. In 2021, Scalefusion was listed in the Gartner Midmarket Context Magic Quadrant for Unified Endpoint Management. Scalefusion was also named as one of the best IT management software products by G2 in 2022. All of this has led us to become a company with 8000+ customers across the globe so far and we have a long way to go ahead.

While many organizations rush to secure their computers, mobile device security is often overlooked. Why do you think that is the case?

Yes, it is. As the boundaries of work and personal lives start blending, the risk further increases. Organizations want their employees to use work email on their personal phones for a prompt reply but the security threats to the data flowing in via work email are often ignored. This is why enterprises need to invest in an MDM solution, such as Scalefusion.

What security tools do you think are essential for personal mobile devices?

For personal mobile devices, it is critical to maintain the containerization of work and personal apps and content. Security tools that are hence critical include: password-protected work containers, per-app VPN – to ensure that work apps are always routed through a secure network, conditional email access – to maintain the security of work emails on personal devices, and certificate management – for seamless user authentication.

Besides implementing mobile security measures, what other best practices do you think companies should follow, especially when teams are working remotely?

Educating your workforce on security threats is crucial. Your data is as secure as your employees want it to be. Hence, creating awareness campaigns, discouraging employees from clicking on phishing emails, and encouraging them to not share and regularly update their passwords is essential.

What advancements and innovations in the mobile device landscape do you hope to see in the near future?

The introduction of 5G is going to heavily impact the mobile device landscape. Moreover, Internet of things (IoT) devices and wearables are going to open up new avenues for enhanced employee availability also bringing in new security threats and challenges.

We hope to see a more security-focused yet employee-centric approach to be adopted. That will be a total win-win for the enterprises as well as the employees.

Share with us, what’s next for Scalefusion?

Our strategy for the coming years would be to develop solutions for the niche markets and tap the unchartered territories across different industry verticals. We are planning to roll out new features like integrating Mobile Threat Defense and OS Patch Management this year. We are focussing on key areas and expansion plans and particularly for these, we are planning to drive the Scalefusion Infinity Partner Program and enhance our OEM collaborations to drive MDM adoption. In doing so, we want to increase our footprint over different arenas and create a much stronger impact.