Meraki, a network company, was acquired by Cisco in late 2012. Together, they are putting out cloud-managed switches, access points, and security appliances. One of Meraki’s strengths is its online management tools. In order to allow others to experience this dashboard, Cisco Meraki actually provides free Mobile Device Management (MDM) to anyone. I decided to take them up on their offer and be able to secure my devices in case of loss and to see what management they allowed.
Meraki’s free MDM solution works on iOS, Android, Windows, OS X, and Chrome OS devices. It could be a good anti-theft utility for your smartphone and laptop.
The Cisco Meraki Systems Manager provides a dashboard with a full enterprise-grade range of capability. You can sign up with just an email address and then log in to start adding clients. I have added my Android smartphone, a Windows ultrabook, and a Windows desktop.
The dashboard shows you all sorts of relevant information from the client like physical location (based on GPS or IP), running processes, network information, and installed applications. You can locate a missing device, run a remote control session (a Java-based VNC), capture a screenshot, and see resource utilization. You can even assign applications to be installed or send a command line remotely. Devices can be left to their default, independent states or assigned profiles to control them to a consistent behavior. Really, there is too much to do to list it all. So far, it has been a matter of come up with something I would like to do and find out how I can do it.
Meraki, despite being free, holds nothing back. The full management suite is available and it is quite versatile. It would work great in an organization as well as for home to reign in all of your devices. Check it out at https://meraki.cisco.com/products/systems-manager