Enterprise mobility has come a long way from being just a jargon to a current-day necessity and companies can no longer ignore its advantages. The business benefits of enterprise mobility have gone beyond offering improved and round-the-clock customer service and employee productivity – in a modern business world it drives efficiency, accuracy, speed, productivity, cost-effectiveness and business growth at all levels. Recently, companies have started to realize the benefits of adopting Mobile Device Management solutions to streamline their inventory of enterprise devices and this has proved to be of immense significance. SMBs as well as large enterprises dealing with an influx of employee-owned and corporate-owned devices find MDM as a perfect solution to manage, control, secure and supervise their devices, which has not only enabled their IT team to work seamlessly but has also added a lot of method to the madness.
We list down the top 6 enterprise mobility challenges that can hinder the anticipated ROI on digital transformation. Let us have a look at the top challenges of business mobility and how an MDM solution can help to mitigate them.
Challenge 1: Curbing Excess Data Costs
One of the first enterprise mobility challenges that IT teams come across is curbing excess data costs on company-owned devices. With mobility comes the use of cellular data. While it is essential to provide uninterrupted data on corporate-owned devices to make full use of enterprise mobility, it’s also crucial to ensure that the data is used strictly for business purposes. Access to the world of internet likens the chances of data being used for surfing the internet for entertainment and accessing other non-business content, putting an unnecessary burden of added costs on the company.
Solution: A well-designed mobile device management solution creates a restricted browsing environment with a restriction to access entertainment apps, open internet, which adds to employee productivity and eliminates unnecessary data cost.
Read More: How to Reduce Mobile Data Costs on Company-owned Devices
Challenge 2: Maintaining Data & Device Security
Not enough can be spoken about how impactful data security is for organizations. Corporate-owned devices can contain sensitive business as well as client data that cannot be compromised at any cost. A loss of device can lead to dangerous consequences driven cause of data theft, loss or hacked. On top of that, there are always threats from unprotected network access and attacks from malware and spyware.
Solution: The devices need a mobile device management solution that covers them against possible security breach by remote wipe-off of data or lock-down of the device.e A robust MDM solution can allow the company IT to apply multiple security policies for extra data protection.
Also Read: Make Your Corporate Device & Data Impregnable in 10 Ways
Challenge 3: Handling Platform/Device Diversity
Another prime challenge of business mobility is handling the device diversity in the enterprise environment. More often than not, enterprise mobility isn’t restricted to one type of device or a particular type of OS. For any enterprise to become mobile, diversity in the form of varied devices, platforms and deployment options becomes important for meeting certain business requirements. One of the challenges this device and OS diversity brings to the table is finding a ‘fits for all’ solution. Most conventional MDM solutions provide support to a specific type of device or platforms.
Solution: Opting for a modern MDM solution that extends support to multiple device types and support multiple OS deployment options from a single console makes things simple. This helps enterprises to opt for a single MDM solution with a single console, which saves costs as well as complexity.
Read More: How to Manage Diversity of Corporate-owned Devices in an Organization
Challenge 4: Real-time Data Access on Devices
One of the prime reasons enterprises go mobile, is to stay ahead in the game of delivering the best with minimal iterations. Consider a sales team with a presentation device that doesn’t have an updated version of the client pitch. Enterprise mobility is practically useless if it’s not real-time. To create an environment where updated content and information is pushed onto corporate-owned devices remotely, real-time is how you can make the most of the mobility. Having up-to-date resources on enterprise devices is one of the important challenges of enterprise mobility.
Solution: A powerful MDM solution comes integrated with capabilities like unified communications, mobile application management and mobile content management that enable the device users to gain real time access to crucial company data and information.
Challenge 5: Instantaneous App Deployment
One of the key applications of enterprise mobility is to provide access to apps that help companies improve business-operation and efficiency. This can include third-party apps that are business-centric as well as native apps, built by the company for its operations. While the companies ensures to keep the user experience consistent across all devices, the biggest challenge is to keep the apps up-to-date. Along with it, there needs to be a provision to publish business-specific apps on enterprise devices that are not openly available on Play Store/App Store.
Solution: An intuitive MDM software provides the capability to remotely publish and update apps for users to stay productive and efficient while completing their work with accuracy and within specific timeline, which fastens time to market as well as better decision making.
Further Reading: How to Publish Private Apps on Managed Devices
Challenge 6: Maintaining Employee Data Privacy
One of the hottest trends in enterprise mobility management is ‘BYOD’- Bring your own device. Instead of going through the hassle of using multiple devices, employees want to use their personal devices for work. Thanks to the familiarity and ease of use this provides, BYOD is actually said to improve employee productivity. It’s a win-win situation for both the company and the employees since companies can save costs on purchasing devices.
What it brings along is the big unreliability of data privacy. Employees need to be ensured that their personal data is never accessed or controlled by their company.
Solution: Adopting a mobile device management solution designed for BYOD helps to put employee and company data and apps in different containers. And while the company-data can be accessed or wiped off, this will not affect the employee’s data on the device.
A company’s digital transformation can accelerate growth only when coupled with a smart mobile device management solution that helps in overcoming these top enterprise mobility challenges. The additional features and capabilities do wonders when it comes to have granular control over all the devices spread across multiple platforms and field-force.