Security and remote management of thousands of commissioners' mobile devices for Census 2021

Autocont has also implemented part of the central management of the census commissioners' terminal equipment as a service as part of the 2021 census project. IBM MaaS360 technology was used to manage and secure 10,000 devices.

Realization 2020 - 2021

Case Studies

Customer profile

Czech Post is a state enterprise operating postal services in the Czech Republic. The employees of the Czech Post were specially trained for the Census. The task of approximately 10,000 census commissioners was mainly to distribute paper census forms according to the information in the mobile phone prepared directly for the commissioners, at a pre-announced date to the population who did not enumerate online.

Each Census Commissioner's mobile phone was connected to Mobile Device Management with IBM MaaS360 technology. This solution ensured complete control over the status of the device and its security level. Continuous updates of the device content could be made without any disruption to the work of the enumerators.

Ing. Martin Šimral

SUPPORT FOR THE DEVELOPMENT AND OPERATION OF UICTG, CZECH POST

Baseline and project objectives

At the very beginning, when it was decided that the census enumerators would be equipped with smartphones, it was clear that 10,000 of these devices would need to be centrally managed. The client's requirement specified the delivery of a service in addition to meeting the technical requirements. Several reputable technologies were considered, with IBM's cloud-based MaaS360 solution being selected following trials.

Benefits

Control over the security and operational status of the equipment at all times.
Unified configuration of all devices.
Bulk execution of operations from a single location.
Implementation as a service and thus zero infrastructure requirements.

Solution

The design process needed to address two critical issues, namely security and the process of preparing 10,000 devices that must be fully configured and ready to work at the time of launch.

From a security perspective, the mobile devices were switched to a so-called kiosk mode, which prevents users from accessing the native user interface of the smartphone. This eliminated most of the complications associated with deploying restrictions using policies. An even more interesting challenge was the process of mass producing 10,000 devices. As part of this task, a service interface was developed in Python that used an IMEI barcode reader. Interestingly, the production line workers had never actually encountered the MaaS environment directly. The detailed procedure followed by the workers included 45 elementary tasks and ended with an automated output check.

Within the production operation, the MaaS solution was then operated by trained employees from the ITSM outsourcing division at AUTOCONT. They were thus able to remotely handle the vast majority of situations that arose during the commissioners' work. After the smartphones had done their job, the termination procedure was initiated, with a mass reset to factory settings at the end of the entire project event.