Transcript of a discussion on how a Minnesota law firm puts the power of diverse mobility to widespread use and keeps confidential and regulated data under strict control.

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How a Minnesota Law Firm
Brings Mission Critical Security
To Myriad Mobile Devices
Transcript of a discussion on how a Minnesota law firm puts the power of diverse mobility to widespread use and
keeps confidential and regulated data under strict control.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Download the transcript. Sponsor: Bitdefender.
Dana Gardner: Welcome to the next edition of the BriefingsDirect podcast series. I’m Dana
Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host and moderator.
Today’s BriefingsDirect mobile devices security and privacy discussion examines how a new
balance needs to be struck between giving users at the remote edge all the productivity they
want, while protecting the most sensitive information.
Stay with us now as we learn how a Minnesota law firm puts the
power of diverse mobility to widespread use and keeps confidential
and regulated data under strict control. Here to share his story of how
to guide small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) to the edge and
back safely is our guest.
Please join me in welcoming, Mark Hatfield, IT Director at Jeff
Anderson & Associates, and IT Infrastructure and Security Consultant
at Hatfield Engineering Corp., both in St. Paul, Minnesota. Welcome,
Mark.
Mark Hatfield: Thank you. Glad to be here today.
Gardner: Mark, what are some of the major business and
productivity trends that have pushed the demand for all kinds of
mobile devices in the field?
Tame the Wild West of devices
Hatfield: For the first time, we’re living in a world where both company data and documents
are accessible from anywhere. Before, it was primarily email. Also, we’re seeing more and more
mobile -- advanced mobile devices, such as the iPad Pro, capable of a lot more than your
smartphones. We need to make sure that these mobile devices are as secure as possible.
In the past, what we had to secure them were mobile device management (MDM) solutions, but
those are not security solutions by themselves. They did have some basic security settings, but
what was missing from these new endpoints in their advanced state -- accessing sensitive
corporate data -- was that we didn’t have a full-blown security client such as Bitdefender, which
we now have on our workstations, servers, and laptops, all reporting back to me in real time
what’s happening.
Hatfield

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Gardner: In order for the productivity to take place and for the security to be accommodated,
have you had to do some jerry-rigging or, are these off-the-shelf solutions? How do you even
approach a solution at the edge such as you’re describing?
Hatfield: Well, if you take a look at the world of MDM, it’s very much a roll-your-own solution. I
mean that in the broadest sense. So, you try to put controls on there and you try to say, “Hey,
your phone has to be up to date. You have to have a passcode to unlock it. If it’s jailbroken or
hacked, we’re not going to allow it.” You can even do things and say, “Well, since we only have
iPhones, we’re only going to allow iPhones to connect.”
That’s all well and good, but that does not stop, for example, malware. It doesn’t give you the
capability to filter the content in the web filtering, and it certainly doesn’t give you the visibility to
view inside of the web traffic that the users are browsing to on these mobile devices.
Gardner: So, you start out with the Wild West, but you have to bring it under law and order.
Let’s learn why that’s so important. Tell us about Jeff Anderson & Associates and why it is so
important that the privacy and management of this critical data is controlled, managed, and
secured.
Hatfield: Jeff Anderson is the premier law firm in the United States for survivors of sexual
abuse. Jeff Anderson is one of the key pioneers in the field. For the survivors that we represent,
that data is extremely confidential and sensitive both from a personal and a legal standpoint.
As I mentioned before, in the past, you would have individuals accessing just email, but now we
have people that need to access sensitive legal documents from their mobile devices. I needed
to add an extra layer of security that MDM was missing.
Gardner: And, of course, these are law firms, so there’s active discovery going on. They’re out
in the field, they’re interviewing people, they’re taking pictures of evidence. There’s myriad types
of media modes and structured and unstructured data. This is no small task -- to give them
safely the full purview of what they want to do their jobs.
Confidential in the cloud
Hatfield: Also, since we’re shifting everything to the cloud, it means that all of our legal
documents are available in the cloud.
Literally, if we allow it, a mobile device can access any of our legal documents from anywhere. It
would be disastrous for an unauthorized individual to gain access to those legal documents,
both from a personal traumatic point of view for the survivors and also from a legal point of view.
We are required to keep those documents safe. They contain sensitive information we need to
keep secure.
Gardner: And as you mentioned, a lot of this is going up to the cloud, so we’re hop, skipping
and jumping over various networks. And so, the in between, the edge, and the cloud all need to
be considered as well.

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Hatfield: That’s the other thing that’s changed, too. In the past, you had users that were going
to access more sensitive corporate data such as documents and applications. They were
required to connect to our private, secured corporate Wi-Fi. But now, with the mobile devices,
they’re out everywhere. They’re in a coffee shop where there’s public Wi-Fi.
We don’t get to control where these mobile
edge devices connect from, so we have to
make sure that even if they’re connected to a
public Wi-Fi spot and making it all the way
back to our cloud to access sensitive
documents, that they remain secure all the way
there and all the way back.
Also, we need to make sure that those phones are free from infection. There could literally be
something on the phone that’s snooping on what the end user is looking at on those mobile
devices.
Gardner: Right. While we’re using Jeff Anderson and Associates as our use case today, and
we’ll be digging more into how that solution came about, this applies to lots of other SMBs,
enterprises, or even departments or divisions within enterprises.
As a consultant, are you seeing these demands across the board -- or only in a handful of
industries? Other than Jeff Anderson & Associates, where are the use cases in verticals that
this demand for mobile security is cropping up?
Hatfield: I also consult for Baldwin Supply in Minneapolis. They supply industrial parts. They do
customized conveyor belts for large agricultural, industrial applications. They don’t have legal
documents that users out in the field need to access, but they need to access their main
company applications that have sensitive information such as sales figures and customer data.
They need to be out in the world as a field representative. When they’re in a factory, they need
to be able to access that data anywhere, and they need to be able to add data, and even get the
client an “on-site,” all through their mobile device. Maybe it’s not the same level of sensitivity
and security that a law firm requires, but that information still has to be kept secure.
Gardner: I imagine that the mobile edge is pervasive across almost all business now. There’s
not too many that wouldn’t want to have the capability to do mobile device security and
compliance in the best way possible.
Hatfield: Yes. It used to be for you to get that kind of access on a mobile device, you had to do
some type of expensive third-party implementation. For example, Microsoft 365, out of the box
even for a small business, they give you access to Word, Excel, SharePoint, OneDrive, not just
Outlook accessing your email. So, every single business is going to get that access and
regardless of what business you’re in, you still want to keep your data secure.
BYOD but, keep personal and business data separate
Gardner: Now, it wasn’t that long ago when people had to decide: Do we allow Bring Your
Own Device, (BYOD) or not? It seems to me that we don’t even concern ourselves anymore
We don’t get to control where these
mobile edge devices connect from,
so we have to make sure … that
they remain secure all the way there
and all the way back.

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whether it’s your device or their device as long as it’s a device. So, we have to secure all the
devices, not just a handful of certain standardized ones, for example.
Hatfield: Correct. That obviously makes it more complicated. In the world of MDM, you basically
end up creating two basic scenarios: One for the corporate-owned devices, the other one for
BYOD.
The BYOD devices, I’m not concerned about their personal information, but any apps that I
deployed to them that are corporate apps that access corporate data, I need to ensure that
piece of it on the BYOD device is secure. Also, if need be, we need to be able to wipe that piece
of the data off of their device without touching the rest of the data on the device.
With a corporate device, we can just say
erase the whole thing if we need to. We don’t
want to erase people’s photos of their children
and things like that. They would get really
upset. It’s not really within our purview to do
that. But, we do need to keep that corporate
data separate and secure and make sure we
have the capability to delete it if necessary.
Gardner: Best practices for security always include onboarding and offboarding people properly
That’s also probably more complex on the device edge.
Hatfield: Yes, it is. If you spend a lot of time properly implementing an MDM solution, you can
automate a lot of that with the two different scenarios. It’s no easy task. Once you get it all
working, it’s really great.
I’m going to take that same approach with the Bitdefender Mobile. Meaning, just like at on
premise, I have different policies for laptops versus workstations versus servers. I’m going to
end up with customized policies. One that applies to corporate MDM devices and another policy
that applies to BYOD devices at a high level.
We’ll probably need to break that down a little bit between Android and Apple, right? The
differences are a little bit more subtle, but at the high level, I’m going to end up with two policies
that are very dialed-in to provide the needed security while also allowing the user to properly
use their device.
Gardner: Let’s dig into the Jeff Anderson & Associates use case a bit more. Tell us how you
developed your security posture at the mobile edge and how you brought it to full execution in
this particular organization?
Hatfield: Typically, in the past, we had just put email on people’s mobile devices, and we’ve
always had a mix of corporate-owned and BYOD. So that’s where we started, where many
people did, and then we added MDM Then we started giving them access to more things such
as Word and Excel, so they could open up attachments.
But then, as we shifted our documents to the cloud, Microsoft was providing a SharePoint client
for your mobile device, and the end user could access all that data. At that point, I said, “We
need more here.” In my mind, these MDMs have almost become full-fledged user endpoints like
We don’t want to erase people’s photos
of their children and things like that. …
But, we do need to keep that corporate
data separate and secure.

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a laptop. They can access the same data, they can perform the same functionality, but what are
they missing?
They don’t have a security client like Bitdefender, right? We managed our on-premises devices
with a group policy and we managed our mobile devices with MDM. I don’t just rely on group
policy to secure my endpoints on-premises, I also have to have that security client. I take that
same philosophy and extend it out to the mobile devices because, if you take a look at the iPad
Pro, it is essentially a laptop.
Gardner: It’s a fat client for sure, right? That’s not a thin client, that’s a fat client.
Hatfield: Right. It can do everything the laptop can do.
Gardner: Yes. And one of the ways to protect a laptop would be to make it a virtual client at the
edge. Everything is really just going back to the cloud. Is that the solution for mobile devices,
too?
Hatfield: No. I used to do a ton of remote
desktop. On-premises, it works extremely
well. If you’re going to say, for example, I’m
going to create a whole virtual desktop that’s
either hosted in the cloud or on-premises for
an end user, how well that performs is based
on how good their connectivity speed is, and the latency. You could control that on-premises or
on your corporate controlled Wi-Fi. But when end users are wherever, the problem is no one
knows what the quality of their connection is going to be.
Yes, it’s enough to surf the internet and get email, but if they’re trying to access an entire virtual
desktop in the cloud or even one that’s hosted on-premises, they’re not going to have a good
experience. I very much have shifted to that we’re focused on the clients or on the endpoints,
but all the data is in the cloud.
Also more and more, we’re seeing where Microsoft and others are starting to shift the actual
client to a web browser. So, it doesn’t make as much sense as it used to, to create a virtual
desktop if the users are accessing most of their apps in a web browser, and that’s all optimized.
Gardner: You find yourself wanting more security for more types of apps and uses at the edge,
you didn’t know of anything off-the-shelf you could easily drop in. You had to do some
customization. Tell us about that mobile security pilot, or proof of concept journey, and where
you are with it right now.
Securing success on traditional and mobile endpoints
Hatfield: The mobile device solution that we utilize is Microsoft Intune. We’re very heavy into
Office 365. It seemed like a natural fit, for the integration. Then, we were looking for an
additional security client that can handle malware and those types of scenarios. I was very
intrigued by Bitdefender. If you have Intune, the Bitdefender technology and security client that
gets installed on the mobile device endpoint adds even more functionality. It ties into Intune.
When end users are wherever, the
problem is no one knows what the quality
of their connection is going to be.

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I’m kind of marrying the two worlds together. In addition to that, I’ve been extremely impressed
with Bitdefender for all of our other needs -- our servers, our workstations, and laptops. They’ve
been extremely helpful. They’ve kept us extremely safe. The other thing that differentiates
Bitdefender from many of the vendors I’ve worked with, is that they listen to your suggestions
and they actually act on them.
I view it as a partnership that has worked out fantastic for doing all of our traditional endpoints.
Now I’m looking to add that to the mobile device, plus, it’s going to integrate with our MDM
solution bringing us even more power.
Gardner: How does that remote agent on the mobile device process work? Are you in control of
that? Do you feel like the user experience is okay? Are they oblivious to it? Is there any
degradation of functionality at the edge when you deploy and use an agent like that for security
and management?
Hatfield: That’s where the testing comes in. Anytime you’re going to deploy something new,
you have to start with some test devices and really, really fine tune it because you cannot
inconvenience the user much. You can’t slow down their performance. They’re basically not
going to tolerate it. They’ll go to upper management. Upper management isn’t going to tolerate
it. They’ll say, “Hey, security is nice, but if we can’t do our job, then security doesn’t mean
anything.”
They have a good point. So, if you do all of your fine
tuning and you make it as secure as possible while at
the same time making it so the user almost doesn’t
even notice, then your acceptance from the users is
going to be much better than if you try to force
something on them that’s inconvenient and that gives
them a negative performance experience.
Gardner: When you’ve crossed that hurdle and you have a good agent that’s helping you with
security, you’re going to deliver that analysis and data somewhere. Have you started using any
security operations centers (SOCs) in the cloud or other services so that you can automate or at
least streamline the process of analyzing and getting any threat reports in as near real time as
possible?
Keeping track of all the data
Hatfield: Bitdefender recently added Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR), to their product
line and that is pulling lots of extra data from the client and compiling it and making it easy to
look at.
It not only understands what’s going on in the endpoint, but they also have call agents that
reach into Office 365 so it knows about Azure authentication, it knows about SharePoint and
OneDrive documents. And it’s compiling all of that for us so that if there is something to look at,
it’s very, very easy in that reporting center to dial in to what you want it to see, complete with
graphs and flows.
Do all of your fine tuning and
make it as secure as
possible, while at the same
time making it so the user
almost doesn’t even notice.

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Let’s say there is something that maybe caught your eye and didn’t look right. I cannot just click
on it and say, “Well, scan it. Is it a virus or not?” I can actually go in because of EDR and I can
see, “Oh, this application talked to this, and it went up to this web site. Yes, it’s okay, it’s valid, I
can whitelist it right now.”
I’m not going to get that alert anymore. Without that EDR component, we would have had to dig
through logs for hours and hours, if we could have found the time to do that.
I was very happy to learn that the EDR component in Bitdefender will be available to extend the
mobile device endpoints. I’m thinking that that EDR component is going to also be tying into
Intune and feeding it more data.
We also do quite a bit of security in
Microsoft’s own realm in the Azure cloud.
You’re marrying it all together so that all of
your data is coming together in an interface
where it’s very easy for you to clearly see
what is happening.
Gardner: That ease of security management, if you will, is super important in the SMBs,
because more often than not in those organizations, the IT director is also the security chief.
And that’s the case with you as well.
How important is it for you to be able to get what you need quickly and easily, with as much
automation and streamlining as possible?
Hatfield: It’s extremely important. Yes, I’m the IT Director, I’m the head of security. I was a
security auditor as a consultant for years before that. I was also a Microsoft Certified Systems
Engineer, so I do a lot of the 365 engineering. I wear a lot of hats. We don’t have a lot of time.
The technology keeps getting more and more complex and coming at us faster and faster, and
the users’ expectations keep growing too, as they’re handed this new technology. So, there’s no
way that we could investigate and feel as secure as we do without that type of EDR solution in
place.
Gardner: Let’s go back and revisit the experiences of those folks at Jeff Anderson & Associates
-- super sensitive information, all sorts of in-the-field activities probably often in a courtroom
setting where time is of the essence when you’re doing discovery of reaction to witnesses or
other reports. What’s been the result? How have you been able to quantify or qualify your
capability to secure that edge and give them the productivity and security and compliance and
privacy that they want?
Secure documents on order in the courtroom
Hatfield: So far, it’s worked out really well. We’ve added a whole other layer of security. I
worked very hard to make sure that the settings that we were applying were not hindering their
performance in a noticeable fashion. Perhaps we did have to “bother the user” for a minute just
to get it set up initially and make sure it was working. But since then, we haven’t had to bother
them at all.
You’re marrying it all together so that all
of your data is coming in together in an
interface where it’s very easy for you to
clearly see what is happening.

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Wi-Fi is available everywhere, even the courtroom. If they don’t have a document that they
copied to their laptop locally or they need an additional document. It’s in our cloud, whether
they’re accessing that on an iPad, or even on a phone in a pinch, they have access to that
document. So, I think it’s worked out very well.
Gardner: Do you have any metrics or key performance indicators (KPIs) that are important for
you to measure how you’re doing your job or how your suppliers are performing their jobs?
What do you look for when you say, “I’m getting my money’s worth here?”
Hatfield: The first thing is we’re not getting any infections. Secondly, it tells you what it’s
blocking, too. When we go up there, I don’t have anything new whitelisted when I roll it out.
I’m seeing everything that it blocks and looks at. So, those are kind of my metrics -- is it looking
at everything? Is it reading inside of the HTTPS web surfing that the end users are doing?
Check, it does that.
Is it looking at when a user pulls a document down from SharePoint? Is it scanning it for anti-
malware? Yes, it is. On the EDR side, is it looking at things such as a user who is pulling down
thousands of documents, which would be out of place for a mobile device, and that sets off an
alert? I’ll even do scenarios that maybe a common attacker would use to see that I get those
alerts. Those are the metrics I use.
Gardner: It’s also important for SMBs where there’s a jack of all IT trades such as yourself that
you’re getting support and the sense of partnership from the supplier. Has Bitdefender been a
good fit in that regard?
Bitdefender: Partners in problem solving, plus AI
Hatfield: They’ve been amazing. It’s an unfortunate trend in our industry where you see
company consolidation and they’ve taken a hatchet to the support staff. They’ve outsourced a
lot of it. So, support is not immediately available. You’re starting with somebody that’s too low-
level for the problem you’re working on -- and a lot of times they’re almost no help at all.
That is not the experience with Bitdefender.
They will either immediately or very quickly get
you to the person you need that can help you
solve the problem. They are real engineers that
understand the product and you can go
through it with them.
There’s been a few rare situations where they’ve remarked, “Wow, you’ve stumbled onto a
scenario here where there might be a bug.” They’ll actually bring it to development to have them
confirm it. I’ve had one or two situations where they did confirm and then they provided an
immediate fix, and the turnaround time was days. That doesn’t happen with any other
companies I have worked with, and I have worked with just about all of them.
Gardner: Let’s look to the future. Mark, what would you like to see happening on the mobile
security front over the next few years? Do you have any ideals in terms of the service, the
[Bitdefender] will either immediately
or very quickly get you to the
person you need that can help you
solve the problem.

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variety of coverage, the amount of automation or even intelligence brought to bear? What would
you like to see in your wish list for the future on the mobile edge?
Hatfield: On the mobile edge, of course, I want to see all aspects of it covered. But what I think
you’re going to need to have it do too is artificial intelligence (AI), where because of EDR, it is
pulling an immense amount of detailed information from the mobile devices and your other
endpoints about the applications and which executable talks to which web site, and it’s
analyzing the entire behavior set.
But I don’t have time to look through all of that. So, you’re going to need something that can, in
an intelligent fashion, look at that gigantic amount of data and come to some conclusions.
Initially, it would be alerts sent to you, but what I want to see is if scenario A, B, or C happens, it
can go ahead and disable the user’s account automatically. Some of this is available in parts of
Bitdefender, where you can configure it to take automated actions on your behalf. I don’t have to
get a notification; I don’t have to look at it because I’m not going to have time.
If the good actors are relying on AI to help increase
safety and productivity, unfortunately the malicious
actors are going to be using AI for nefarious purposes,
too. Without that automation piece and without it being
intelligent, and without its capability to take actions on
your behalf when needed, you will not have time to
respond. It’s going to take that level of sophistication to
keep us safe in the future.
Gardner: I’m afraid we’ll have to leave it there. You’ve been listening to a sponsored
BriefingsDirect discussion on how a new balance is being struck between giving users at the
remote edge all the productivity they want while protecting the most sensitive information.
And we’ve learned how the power of diverse mobility can boost innovation and productivity
while keeping confidential and regulated data under strict control.
So join me now in thanking our guest, Mark Hatfield, IT Director at Jeff Anderson & Associates,
and IT Infrastructure and Security Consultant at Hatfield Engineering Corp., both in St. Paul,
Minnesota. Thank you so much, Mark.
Hatfield: Thank you. It was great to be here.
Gardner: I’m Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions. Your host and moderator
for this ongoing series of BriefingsDirect discussions. A big thank you to our sponsor,
Bitdefender, for supporting these presentations.
And a big thank you as well to our audience for joining. Pass this on to your IT and security
communities, and do come back next time.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Download the transcript. Sponsor: Bitdefender.
Transcript of a discussion on how a Minnesota law firm puts the power of diverse mobility to widespread use and
keeps confidential and regulated data under strict control. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2024. All rights
reserved.
If the good actors are relying
on AI to help increase safety
and productivity, unfortunately
the malicious actors are going
to be using AI for nefarious
purposes, too.

10. Page 10 of 10
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