Case Study: North Hennepin Community College achieves secure BYOD—protecting student data and faculty intellectual property while boosting productivity with BlackBerry

College Secures Student Information and Intellectual Property on Personal Devices

North Hennepin Community College (NHCC), a 350-employee institution serving about 10,750 students in the Minnesota State system, needed to support faculty and administrators who prefer using personal smartphones and tablets while protecting sensitive student records and faculty intellectual property. The IT team had to enable BYOD workflows without tracking employee location and prevent risky behaviors like emailing work documents to personal webmail, saving to USB drives, or uploading files to consumer cloud services.

NHCC implemented the BlackBerry Enterprise Mobility Suite – Collaboration Edition (including BlackBerry Work and the BlackBerry Dynamics container) to encrypt and separate work data, enable remote wiping of the work container without affecting personal data, and disable location services in the work container to meet bargaining-unit privacy requirements. Nearly 100 faculty and administrators adopted the solution; faculty report saving 5–7 hours weekly by grading on tablets, administrators complete tasks during meetings, and IT fulfills its fiduciary responsibility to secure student information and faculty IP.

North Hennepin Community College

Joe Swenson

Information Technology Specialist