Case Study: Fairfield Residential achieves a 20% IT cost reduction and stronger mobile security with MobileIron

Fairfield Residential trims IT costs with employee-liable smartphones

Fairfield Residential, a large U.S. apartment developer and manager with about 2,500 employees and roughly 450 mobile email users, faced tight capital markets after filing Chapter 11 in 2009. The company needed to cut IT costs while supporting a growing mix of smartphones (BlackBerry, iPhone, Android) and maintaining security and control under an employee-liable device model.

Fairfield switched to employee-liable devices and deployed MobileIron Sentry and Activity Intelligence alongside its BlackBerry Enterprise Server to track ActiveSync devices, block risky downloads, and monitor usage. The changes cut IT costs by about 20% annually (tens of thousands of dollars), prevented the download of sensitive files to phones, and provided near-real-time alerts for roaming and usage spikes—giving the IS team better security and expense control while supporting a mixed-device environment.

Fairfield Residential