Mobile is at the heart of digital transformation and the proliferation of mobile devices in the workplace makes Mobile Device Management a subject worth reckoning for organizations around the globe. According to a report published by The Radicati Group, the projected forecast for the worldwide revenues for the Enterprise Mobility market is pegged at more than $3.3 billion annually by the year 2021 or an estimated average annual growth rate of 18 percent over the next four years.
Are you ready to drive mobility in your business?
With such explosive growth in the pipeline, managing enterprise mobility has become even more critical and this is where a Mobile Device Management (MDM) strategy could prove very useful. MDM provides IT with a complete set of inventory, control, and reporting tools that make it easy to manage mobile devices wherever they are. As per a Gartner report, MDM solutions can reduce the total cost of ownership (TCO) of mobile devices by over 50%.
A robust and powerful MDM solution can provide support for multiple operating systems and a successful MDM strategy will surely promote employee engagement, productivity at work, and business profitability. Here is how an organization can develop and adopt an unbeatable Mobile Device Management strategy to create the right balance between business advantages and employee satisfaction while driving overall enterprise performance.
1. Identify organizational goals and requirements
A right MDM strategy needs to be built with a long-term vision so that it adds value to the company and its employees. Begin with the end in mind. How is the MDM strategy going to affect your company in the next 5 years? This is an important question to ask when you are thinking of putting together an MDM strategy for your business. Also, it needs to be in line with your organizational objectives, employee adaptiveness, business goals, work culture, enterprise challenges, mission, and customer expectations. As an important interface, your MDM strategy should also decide how much control you want to give away: whether you want to have a BYOD (bring your own device), CYOD (choose your own device), strict kiosk lockdown mode, COBO (corporate-owned business only) or COPE (corporate-owned, personally-enabled) policy.
The organization needs to undertake a review of what kind of security, regulatory, network as well as monitoring capabilities it requires and build the MDM strategy accordingly.
Learn more: BYOD vs CYOD vs COBO vs COPE – Know the Difference
2. Embrace a user-centric cloud-based solution
The objective of a Mobile Device Management strategy is to create a flexible work environment for employees and empower them to be productive. As more and more employees adopt using enterprise mobility solutions to complete work-related tasks, they need to have seamless and secure access across the devices so that information inflow is unrestricted and secured. Hence, for the MDM strategy to be successful, the solution should offer an excellent user experience in terms of activities like using the enterprise apps, tracking task progress and accessing enterprise content with security, and so on, from the cloud. Companies need to review their existing infrastructure so that they can build from there with more agile and DevOps-based continuous delivery methods to support newer innovations and product developments.
At the same time, it is imperative to work with a Mobile Device Management Solution that is easy to use, implement and manage from a centralized place for enhanced IT supervision and control.
3. Make it comprehensive and scalable
With the influx of employees working out of the fields and BYOD policy at the workplace, we are not just simply looking at the enterprise-owned network of computers, mobiles, and tablets but a plethora of employee-owned devices with different settings and functionalities. On top of it, organizations also need to manage and secure multiple endpoints such as rugged devices, digital signages, mobile Point of Sale devices, and so on. A successful Mobile Device Management strategy will ensure that all these scattered and heterogeneous devices are managed, secured, and streamlined effortlessly from the cloud while complying with multiple aspects like company IT security management, usage supervision, configuration management, local policy enforcement, auditing, reporting and analyzing. A strong MDM strategy is one that considers all the scopes and limitations of the company. It must acclimate all operational requirements and challenges of the overall IT management system.
Companies are expected to know that adopting an MDM strategy should not create a big footprint on their already existing infrastructure and hence they should ideally leverage platform-native technologies and services, which saves cost, effort, and time for them.
Learn More: Things you should know about your mobile workforce
4. Build an inclusive security solution
Security concerns are the major roadblocks while implementing a successful MDM strategy as devices with unrestricted access and lesser IT control are more susceptible to security risks and threats like a data breach, data loss, data abuse, loss of a device, and network threats. How are you going to protect the data is a question not to be missed. You can bring in multi-layer, multi-factor authentication levels for high-risk activities. If you are using APIs, then managing those in a seamless and secure manner is again another challenge. Understanding what kind of encryption levels to bring in will help you plug your critical security loopholes and insulate your MDM strategy against cyber vulnerabilities. At the same time, companies must implement and execute robust and flawless IT security policies and regulations to ensure the total security of all endpoints.
Strong passcode policy management and other security settings should be at a place to create all-inclusive and 360-degree protection for all corporate data and devices.
5. Analyze metrics for a better user experience
To keep your organization agile, the systems that are driving it, need to be monitored and evaluated frequently. Your MDM strategy should always consider new trends and technologies entering the EMM market. Studying the analytics of user behavior can also help uncover great patterns on how to make your MDM strategy better and more useful for the coming time. Regular and timely customer feedback with a powerful customer support system forms the backbone of a successful MDM strategy that drives continuous product/solution development and innovation at levels.
Enterprise Mobility comes with its share of risks and returns. While it brings great agility into the workplace, it also has a high exposure rate. A winning MDM strategy empowers with the right amount of data control, removes data silos, and offers a great user experience, all within a more secure and scalable environment.
Also Read: Why your organization needs tech-savvy employees?
