IBM Unveils MaaS360 Advisor for Mobility Management

At the IBM InterConnect 2017 conference, IBM announced that Watson can now be used for mobile device management (MDM). According to PCMag, users should now think of Watson as an artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) layer that can be added to different apps.

IBM unveiled the MaaS360 Advisor at their recent conference, a new Watson-powered cognitive assistant within its MDM platform. Whether you hear it referred to as MDM, mobile application management (MAM), enterprise mobility management (EMM), or unified endpoint management (UEM), they all have a common goal: to help IT keep track of and manage endpoints and devices within an organization, all while protecting the apps and devices that go along with them.

The MaaS360 Advisor will utilize ML to evaluate devices. ML will also allow the advisor to suggest policies, best practices and patches to implement for better management and security.

“The cognitive insights being provided by IBM MaaS360 Advisor are revolutionary from an IT perspective,” Wes Gyure, IBM MaaS360 Strategy and Portfolio Offering Manager at IBM told PCMag. “The insights range from fundamentals, like advising the IT team on emerging threats and how they impact the user environment, to providing proactive planning and implementing configuration changes that, until now, were never possible.”

He went on to name virtual private networks (VPNs) for example. The MaaS360 Advisor is able to automate VPN certificate deployment harnessing predictive data, like a weather forecast that would prompt employees to work from their home office. And Gyure said IBM is also teaching Watson how to enroll devices, meet regulatory compliance standards and pull relevant insights from tons of documents. Plus, it can pull in useful endpoint security data that will highlight malware threats.

“First, our team has annotated hundreds of documents to build a taxonomy for endpoint management,” Gyure told PCMag. “This guides Watson as it ingests documents to look for information like device enrollment, identity management, and regulatory compliance as examples of data that it’s inspecting. By analyzing and detecting patterns across these data sets, IBM MaaS360 Advisor will be able to detect instances of where particular app configuration policies, like deploying a single sign-on configuration, can improve application usage dramatically with end users. Additionally, IBM MaaS360 Advisor will be able to detect and make recommendations on active configurations that violate or are non-conformant with data privacy regulations, like GDPR.”

PCMag reported that the value of the IBM-Watson advisor is the means to aggregate and evaluate all of the data sources and then include them in a successful IT management strategy. If you’re a current IBM MaaS360 customer, you can access the MaaS360 Advisor for free. New customers can get their hands on it by purchasing the Essentials bundle.

Still not sure if this is the right choice for you? Check out our Mobility Management Buyer’s Guide for more info on all the top vendors in this space.