Blue Cedar Launches New Tool for Security Policy Management

PRESS RELEASE

SAN FRANCISCO, May 8, 2018 — Blue Cedar today announced the addition of a new dynamic policy capability to its flagship Enterprise product that allows enterprises to leverage mobility to accelerate their digital transformation strategies. Using this innovative dynamic policy capability, IT teams can now easily push fine-grained security controls to mobile apps protected by Blue Cedar. 

“Customers using Blue Cedar Enterprise now have exceptional control over the conditions under which their apps execute,” said Kevin Fox, Blue Cedar CTO. “They can automatically secure mobile apps and deploy fine-grained policy controls without altering the app in any way—and with no additional development work or coding required. Teams can deploy sophisticated policies or update controls across all of their mobile apps in just minutes, greatly reducing risk.”

The January 2018 attacks by Spectre and Meltdown triggered intense concern about protecting mobile apps from processor flaws. The attacks are so complex that patching requires fixes to mobile device chips, firmware, operating systems, and applications.  In a BYOD world, even enterprises that pushed out OS vendor patches had no way of knowing whether users managed to patch their own devices and whether their secure mobile apps were running on a secure platform. 

Blue Cedar enables IT teams to regulate access control based on dynamically configurable rules, rather than having to resort to less intelligent “allow” or “block” controls. For example, in an environment with multiple apps that must run securely, teams can configure rules that first warn users to upgrade the OS or install security patches before a certain deadline and then block access after the deadline passes. Administrators have complete control over end-user screens, how they appear in apps, and whether to serve or block end users or warn and allow them in. 

Blue Cedar also enables customers with corporate app stores to notify their users of information related to Blue Cedar-secured apps via an embedded link to the app store, giving them fine-grained control over app lifecycle communications. For example, customers can deliver custom notifications to apps that inform end users that they are using out-of-date versions of internal apps, that newer versions of apps are available, or that old versions of apps are going out of service. They can issue multiple warnings to users to upgrade an app or face being blocked, and they can set deadlines for users to upgrade to avoid being blocked.

Mobile app administrators can also deliver custom notifications to inform end users of app downtime windows. For example, if an enterprise plans to shut down its corporate infrastructure for maintenance, the mobile team can notify end users that their service will go down on a certain date or for a certain amount of time. When mobile apps are secured by Blue Cedar, administrators can display OS-native notifications at a particular date or time to all active app users. There is no need to find a list of users, send emails, or modify app source code. Any message can be displayed according to established criteria, and the tool is normalized across all apps in the enterprise—even if apps come from different sources and are written by different authors.