How to secure vendor emails on personal devices without MDM
Organizations often need to give external contractors and vendors access to company alerts and browser-based apps on their own personal computers or phones. Because these workers are scattered globally and use bring-your-own-device setups, companies want to avoid invasive MDM enrollment or complicated user exceptions while still protecting corporate data.
What people tried
Every workaround mentioned in the threads below. We haven’t tested any of them — and nobody here is claiming they worked.
- 1Providing company-issued phones to vendors
- 2Forwarding alerts to the vendor's external email address or domain
- 3Using Mobile Device Management (MDM) or Mobile Application Management (MAM) like Microsoft Intune with security restrictions
- 4Using notification services like ntfy or gotify
- 5Using Edge MAM and Intune app protection on work profiles
- 6Implementing Defender for Cloud Apps session control
- 7Deploying an enterprise browser like Island, Prisma Access Browser, or Chrome Enterprise Premium
- 8Using VDI or Windows 365
In their words
Unedited, grouped by where they were said, most upvoted first within each place, each linked to the thread it came from.
“A client has about 50 offshore customer-service contractors who bring their own Windows PCs. They're scattered all around the globe, including the EU. Everything they use runs in a browser: primarily Google Workspace, Shopify admin and Zendesk.”source ↗
“Since they're in random countries, we can't easily issue corporate hardware. We want to try to avoid MDM-enrolling personal machines, too.”source ↗
“we donot allow emails on personal phones, need vendors to see alerts and such, looking for a secure way rather than adding exclusion for the users”source ↗
Where this came up
People with this problem also raised
- 12How to use AI for accounting without breaking client confidentiality
- 7Can I refuse to use my personal phone for work?
- 9Why is managing company mobile devices and mail apps so frustrating?
- 3How to tell if a BEC attack was caught automatically or by a human
- 3How to manage multiple business email accounts without a chaotic mess
- 6How to stop wedding vendors from posting your photos online