CIO Bulletin

SyncDog Inc. - Building mobile security solution with the mobile worker in mind

The phenomenon of “bring your own device” (BYOD) has gained popularity in recent years due to its many advantages, including increased productivity and flexibility for both employers and employees. BYOD has become much more accessible and crucial for many of us in today’s world as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic and the prevalence of working from home.

Even today, IT departments still struggle to keep up with the rapid changes in technology. Employees are becoming more eager to carry their own devices for accessing corporate data as a result of this struggle. Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) is now a catch-all phrase that encompasses a number of different initiatives, including Bring Your Own Technology (BYOT), Bring Your Own Phone (BYOP), and Bring Your Own PC (BYOPC). These programs have been developed to empower employees and bring them up to speed with the idea of “IT consumerization.” As part of this, the BYOD initiative promotes staff members using their own devices while at work to access their corporate email or read text documents on their phones and tabs.

The BYOD phenomenon does have a negative side, though. It can endanger the very foundations of IT security and put a company’s business systems at risk when not fully understood.

Therefore, it’s crucial to pick the best BYOD solution provider for your business in order to safeguard your staff and yourself from nefarious individuals (or governments) out to get you and your organization. Look no further than SyncDog Inc. when looking for the best BYOD security solution providers on the market.

By challenging the status quo and altering the rules of the game, SyncDog transforms how businesses empower their mobile workforce. They give businesses the opportunity to reevaluate what is expected of mobile workers in terms of securing devices and, in turn, networks. The business is aware that organizations must be flexible in order to confidently leverage talent across diverse geographies, and their solution offers a safe way to create an integrated workforce. You can use a single instance of their Secure.Systems solution for your mobile workforce as well as for outside consultants and contractors.

Your staff members ought to be able to work remotely from any location. With SyncDog, you can finally put an end to the technological dilemma of having to choose between increased security and increased productivity by combining a suite of office applications like email, calendar, contacts, office editor, file share, location services, messaging, etc. with an architecture that protects and secures your mobile workforce through FIPS 140-2 and AES 256 bit encryption. With SyncDog, you can have both.

Recently, CIO Bulletin spoke to Jonas Gyllensvaan, the Founder and CEO of SyncDog Inc. The following excerpts are taken from that conversation.

Q. Why did SyncDog start out?

After a successful startup and exit with Conceivium Business Solutions, a software company, I took on a role as consultant with the acquiring company, Fixmo, a mobile-device infrastructure management solutions provider. When I witnessed the explosion of BYOD in the early 2010s, I saw a growing need in the market for a simpler, easier-to-deploy solution that secured personal devices on corporate and government networks. That solution was SyncDog, Inc. and its secure mobile container offering.

Describe the services and solutions you provide.

SyncDog is a software manufacturer. We provide mobile security solutions integrated with MDM and EMM tools our customers own. We also provide consulting and integration services to deploy the solutions we sell. Our products are sold and supported across the globe with follow-the-sun support.

SyncDog delivers a complete, integrated modular solution for mobile device protection that includes

Email and data encryption
Secure support for BYOD
A robust native or hybrid app store within the container
Anti-malware/anti-phishing capabilities
DLP/Dual Persona Capabilities
Support for iOS or Android
Role-based access control

Q. How do you conduct market research to stay one step ahead of the competition?

Our leaders benefit from having a better sense of the client’s business and what’s happening in the market that is affecting the client thanks to this closer communication. With this knowledge, we can improve the functionality of upcoming software releases on the SyncDog product roadmap.

Because we are a smaller business than the larger enterprise software vendors, we are able to have closer relationships with our clients. When a customer calls SyncDog for support, they are instantaneously assisted with a representative and directed to the sales, or operations teams.

Q. How do you help reduce security risks?

Device security is done through data and app isolation. SyncDog is a segmented, separate virtual container on the mobile device that has its own access and FIPS 140-2, AES 256-bit encryption. It is also tightly integrated with the leading EMM and MDM solutions, allowing 360-degree visibility into all activity on the device from corporate and public sector security operations consoles, or SOCs. Any attempts to intrude on the device are revealed in the log data shared between the device and the SOC. If any remediation activity is needed, that functionality is available to security admins and operations teams within the EMM, MDM, and/or SOC.

Q. How do you distinguish yourself from your competitors?

SyncDog is a significantly agile, customer-focused mobile security vendor. We are perhaps more in tune with the market than our larger competitors, whose development and support teams may be pulled in multiple directions in firefighting mode (essentially, they have more fires to put out and more bosses internally to answer to). Our organization is smaller and more focused on filling gaps in the marketplace and supporting current deployments.

Support is big for SyncDog. When you call or submit a ticket, you get a human on the phone or through chat almost immediately. Because we don’t have thousands of customers needing support from a small handful of support engineers, we are more responsive to customer needs. Because we are smaller, we have better relationships internally amongst the team (meaning we are more effectively on the same page), and our employees tend to have more longevity in tenure than larger software vendors.

As with the Pegasus and Predator zero click attacks, all MDM-based solutions fail when a device is jailbroken or rooted, but SyncDog is really the only truly zero-trust solution that guards against all attacks, known and unknown. True BYOD without any actual or perceived invasion of personal privacy is possible with SyncDog because it is not dependent on an MDM device profile being installed on the device. Furthermore, without gaining access to the device, SyncDog can isolate and secure email, data, and apps used for work from those used for personal purposes.

It’s more personal when you engage with SyncDog. Because we are smaller, our development and support teams see the fruits of their labor more clearly than a massive software organization with thousands of developers. In many instances, in those shops, the development and support teams never know the impact of their work. At SyncDog, we do, and we genuinely care about the success of our products in client environments because it’s a reflection of our work.

Enabling firms to provide security for their employees’ devices

Jonas Gyllensvaan is the Founder and CEO of SyncDog. He is a successful founder of multiple mobility technology companies and has been a leader in the information technology marketplace for over 20 years. He has specifically been exploring advancements in mobile device security since the 1990s. His focus is continual product enhancement; he takes client feedback to heart, and then he takes it to R&D.

He has a bachelor’s in mechanical engineering from Högskolan i Halmstad in Sweden, and cybersecurity courses from Harvard University are the roots of his passion for innovating technologies for modern operational environments. Jonas’s ability to constantly innovate solutions to business technology pain points is what has led SyncDog to become a leading independent software vendor (ISV) for enterprises of all sizes.