Rayonier Migrates to App-Centric, Flexible Enterprise Mobility Program with Citrix XenMobile MDM

Rayonier is a leading forest products company with a focus on forest resources, high-end performance fibers, and timberland real estate. With 2.7 million acres of land under management, operations in the U.S. and New Zealand, and sales in more than 40 countries globally, Rayonier has grown the company to $1.5B in annual revenue.

Rayonier supplies some of the most highly-purified cellulose fiber materials to product makers around the world, used in manufacturing from filters to LCD screens to food products. Rayonier produces sustainable forestry by planting more trees than it cuts down. The company supports arts and culture through the Rayonier Foundation, partners with the United Way and other charitable organizations, and has been recognized for corporate excellence nationally and internationally, including by the U.S. State Department.

Tasked with an objective to replace the company’s BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES) deployment with a more stable, flexible, app-centric infrastructure in order to help employees be more productive on-the-go, Rayonier embarked on a project to issue corporate-owned iPhones and iPads and support a smattering of personally-owned iOS and Android devices, all while maintaining a similarly strong security posture to that they had with BlackBerry. On point for these objectives is IT Director, Adam Rasner.

The challenge: Migrate to iOS and cloud-based MDM without compromising security

As part of an overall strategy to move IT applications to the cloud, as well as a mobile strategy to enable a more flexible, app-centric mobile paradigm for users, Rasner and his team decided to migrate away from its BlackBerry Enterprise Server to a combination of supported mobile devices and a cloud-based mobile device management (MDM) solution. On the device side of the equation, the team chose Apple iPhones and iPads because of Apple’s standardization across products and releases. On the MDM side, Rasner and his team evaluated three vendors, including Citrix.

Near-term, the team needed to provide management and security for several hundred executives, department heads, mill managers, and IT professionals on their iPhones and iPads. They were in the midst of developing a detailed mobile policy that addressed topics from app purchasing to device replacement to GPS tracking, and needed features that would support that policy. From a security perspective, they needed to track, lock, and wipe devices in the event of loss, theft, or employee departure. They also wanted to roll out corporate email, provision enterprise resources such as WiFi and VPN, and push apps like Evernote and Docs2Go. Finally, they wanted to enable a high-quality, secure experience for web-based applications such as mill reporting so that a manager could, for example, get up-to-the minute pulp production volumes for a given mill.

Longer-term, the team wants to develop custom apps to assist the organization’s lines of business make applications and data available to users when and where they need them, including making content from SharePoint Services available on mobile devices while maintaining policy-based content control.

The solution: Mobile management and a few “a-has” with XenMobile MDM

Following a thorough review of the three MDM vendors, Rasner and his team chose Citrix because of its cloud architecture and solution flexibility.

“One of the cloud providers we evaluated uses a shared database instance for their client data,” explains Rasner. “This made me concerned about mobile downtime, data exposure, or data corruption. The judgment of co-mingling customer data called into question other architectural choices the company made. We were much more comfortable with the Citrix model of providing a dedicated database instance for each customer.”

“The other solution we evaluated,” Rasner continues, “was perfectly adequate on many fronts, but the flexibility just wasn’t there. I wasn’t always able to take action as quickly as I needed to. For example, if an executive called the support desk because they lost their device, for IT to wipe the device with that solution would require a support ticket and a 4-8-hour turnaround. That just wasn’t going to work for our needs.”

However, more important than architecture and flexibility were ease-of-use and comfort with the Citrix team. “At the end of the day, it comes down to ease of implementation, ease of administration, how quickly I can train my team on the solution, and how comfortable I feel with sales and support,” Rasner explains. “My comfort level with Citrix across all of those was much higher than with other vendors.”

Rasner also calls out a few “a-ha’s”, or additional Citrix capabilities that the team found useful post-sale. These include the ability to:

• Configure settings prior to rolling corporate email out to devices;
• Set WiFi policies and automate WiFi key changes to reduce help desk calls;
• Manage mobile app purchases through the Apple App Store; and
• Push out VPN profiles, including Cisco AnyConnect

“I didn’t realize I could push out AnyConnect too,” notes Rasner. “It’s half the battle that I don’t have to tell the user how to do it.”

The result: Mobile device management that supports the business

After identifying a strategy to migrate from BES to a more flexible, app-centric approach supporting iOS and deploying XenMobile MDM, Rayonier supports users by providing mobile devices that support their use cases now and in the future. With Citrix, Rayonier was able to:

• Get up and running quickly with a straightforward deployment process
• Easily configure resources such as WiFi, VPN, and corporate email
• Push mobile apps to devices
• Protect corporate data and support its mobile policy

Rasner and his team look forward to continuing to innovate and make mobile a key enabler for employee productivity and success. And Citrix looks forward to helping them do it!