Mobile devices like smartphones, tablets, etc, have become an indispensable and essential factor in the corporate world and are being widely used for work purposes. Organizations are increasingly realizing the power of a flexible and mobile work environment. In a flexible and mobile work environment, employees access organizational data and content on mobile devices from any place on the globe at any time. This helps employees strike a balance between their professional and personal lives, and it helps companies establish seamless communication between field employees and the base office.
However, Enterprise Mobility may lead to critical security concerns for business data, apps, and devices if not managed and secured efficiently. Thus, to meet the security challenges, Enterprises need a powerful and secure Mobile Device Management (MDM) Solution. An MDM solution monitors, secures, and controls the mobile devices used by employees for work purposes in the office environment. It allows access to corporate apps, data, and content under assured security.
Enterprise Mobility involves challenges, and organizations are required to choose from several mobility solution providers in the market. Hence, before choosing an MDM solution, companies need to do a thorough requirement and feasibility analysis. After the analysis, they prepare a comprehensive report of all their pain points and, based on that, prepare to choose an MDM solution. To ensure Enterprise Management chooses the right MDM solution, important factors must be considered.
Here are 7 Factors you Must Consider While Choosing a Mobile Device Management (MDM) Solution
1. Types of the devices supported
As we are already aware, there are different types of smartphones, tablets, and different operating systems used by different organizations. For e.g., some organization deploys Android devices, while some iOS or Windows. Even in Android, some deploy Samsung Knox or LG; hence, depending on the operating system and make, organizations first need to figure out which devices and operating systems they would like to deploy for their requirement and within their budget. Based on that, they can search for those solutions that provide solutions and support those devices specifically.
2. Security Management
The critical aspect of the selection of any MDM solution is security management. Security management refers to ensuring the safety of the business data, business content, and devices. Since field employees or regular employees will be accessing the corporate data from any place and at any time, proper authentication, passwords, and encryption aspects must be in place. The solution should ensure proper lockdown or usage restriction of the devices since employees may misuse the device and access social media or gaming websites or apps, which may lead to malware in the system. In case of theft, a provision for the remote wipe out and/or capturing of the identification details like location, time, and device theft is highly recommended.
3. Trial Period
Almost all solution providers give a trial period, in which an organization can deploy the solution, enroll their devices, and work on it. During this time, you can actually find out hands-on whether the mobile device management solution will be able to cater to your requirements or not. If you think it will not, you have the option to opt-out and not continue further. Many solution providers even extend the trial periods at the customer’s request.
4. App Management
Your organization may need specific business apps or third-party apps; hence, you need to look out whether app management is part of the Mobile Device Management solution or not and how are the app updates distributed on the enrolled devices.
5. Device Monitoring
Depending on your requirements, up to what level do you want mobile devices to be monitored and controlled. Whether the solution provides location tracking and geofencing features or not, whether they provide single app mode or multi-app mode, whitelisting and blacklisting of the websites, and a number of other features.
6. Content Management
The security of business content is one of the critical priorities of any business. A good mobility solution enables the organization to upload, distribute, and modify the content from the central dashboard to the enrolled devices. This is very useful in use cases where a field employee or a sales rep needs a business presentation to show to clients.
7. Support and Service Management
After deployment of the MDM software, you will require proper support from the provider until it is successfully implemented across all the enrolled devices. Generally, support and after-sales services are the deciding factors for any organization. It is better if support is provided by the SaaS provider. Hence, always do your research thoroughly and find out which providers give good support and services based on user reviews.
To sum up, it is important to understand the pros and cons of any Mobile Device Management solution before deciding whether it is the best fit for your organization or not. Organizations should ideally lookout for the differentiating factors and then comprehensively prepare to choose the right MDM Solution.
The differentiating factor can be cost, features, support, and service. The solution can be cloud-based or on-site, or it can provide a number of features, but you may require only a few of them. Hence, all such points, if evaluated with some research and analysis, can lead to a better decision, thus leading to better ROI and efficient management, control, and security of corporate-owned mobile devices.
After being a multi-OS MDM platform, Scalefusion has now introduced the OneIdp IAM Suit. Now you can efficiently manage and control access management on your corporate-owned iOS, Android, Windows, and Mac devices from a Unified Dashboard.
