About the Blue Cedar Platform

Welcome to the Blue Cedar Platform, a workflow orchestration platform for mobile app deployment within managed enterprise environments.

It's common to think of mobile apps as a one-way street. A user downloads an app from an app store and uses it for various life activities: requesting a rideshare pickup, checking their email, finding the nearest gas station. But what about corporate environments, where even ordinary text messaging or directory services might be subject to additional controls?

The Blue Cedar Platform offers a reliable and straightforward app deployment process where you can integrate with various vendor SDKs without writing a single line of code. Blue Cedar's no-code integration can speed your deployment with fewer manual steps, coordinating across multiple teams and locations.

Blue Cedar services provide extensible functionality for specific features such as distribution platforms or different no-code integration options. Each service is enabled through a corresponding extension. You can create multiple configurations for Blue Cedar Platform extensions and then select from among them when adding steps to your workflows.

Who uses Blue Cedar?

Here are some examples of how you can use the Blue Cedar platform to automate and streamline your mobile app deployments:

• You are a small regional law enforcement team with one app for about 100 users. You need to integrate additional mobile app security controls using BlackBerry Dynamics SDK, and then sign and distribute this app for iOS and Android over your existing BlackBerry UEM.
• You are a financial services corporation with several locations, and you want to distribute your own internal apps for meeting room bookings, employee directory, and proprietary financial reporting. All of these apps access data behind a firewall, and some of them are running on employee-owned devices that aren't fully managed.
• You are a health care company that just migrated to Microsoft Intune for device management, and you want to augment the capability of the Microsoft Edge browser for use on company-issued mobile devices.
• You are a multinational construction group with over 200 in-house proprietary apps, built by different teams with varying levels of security controls. You'd like to standardize all your apps to use the same process for integration, signing, approval, and distribution, and ensure that all your security policies are consistently applied across all locations.
• You are a national government of a country with around 90 million people, and you would like to distribute a secure app that your citizens can use to apply for visas, drivers licenses, and identity cards.

Challenges for mobile app modification

Modifying an app after development, especially if you don't have access to the source code or a development team, can be time-consuming and expensive. Following mobile app development, a number of critical deployment activities are still needed before the app can be made available to end users within an organization.

Examples of such activities include:

• Scanning the app to identify security vulnerabilities
• Adding new functionality into previously compiled apps when the source code isn’t available
• Signing the app after post-development modifications
• Pushing the app to a public app store or enterprise app catalog

Benefits of using the Blue Cedar Platform

The sequence of deployment activities can vary, depending on the needs of the enterprise. Currently, mobile app deployments are often disjointed, with error-prone processes that rely on manual coordination across multiple teams and technologies. Deployment teams are often severely limited in the types of post-development deployment activities that they can perform.

The Blue Cedar Platform streamlines and simplifies mobile app deployment through workflows that orchestrate and automate deployment activities where appropriate. Benefits include:

• Reliability for all deployments through workflows that enforce the required sequences of deployment activities. For example, you can ensure that app signing approvals happen at the same point in the workflow every time that workflow is run.
• Additional controls through deployment services that enable enterprises to secure both data and devices, even after app development is complete
• Deeper visibility into the deployment flow at every stage as described in Using the Dashboard.
• Greater deployment extensibility through integrations with your existing mobile development stack. For example, if you already use BlackBerry for mobile device management or app management, you can use Blue Cedar's no-code integration to add the BlackBerry SDK, re-sign the app, and later distribute the mobile app on your organization's designated BlackBerry UEM.

Functionality supported by Blue Cedar

Highlights of Blue Cedar Platform functionality include: 

• App import from GitLab and GitHub
• App scanning 
• No-code integrations for:
  • BlackBerry Dynamics app security
  • Microsoft Intune App SDK
  • Microsoft Authentication Library for authentication
  • Blue Cedar Connect (in-app VPN)
• App signing for Android and iOS
• App distribution to BlackBerry UEM and Microsoft Endpoint Manager