MAM and Application Readiness in a BYOD World

A recent article in App Developer Magazine takes a look at how applications are being effects and how IT needs to manage applications in the ever increasing environment of enterprise mobility. As corporations become increasingly mobile, threats around devices and employees have been talked about in great length. This article takes a look at corporate applications and how they are specifically affected by Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) and some of the management issues that those programs present. Their theme revolves around what they are calling Applications Readiness and Mobile Application Management (MAM).

With BYOD bring in a variety of devices and operating systems which can be updated at the discretion of the employee  the article calls for IT to address their “Application Readiness processes and automation capabilities to accommodate the new world of mobile devices, operating systems and apps.” Now that IT is losing some of the control they used to hold on devices they need to be prepared for the variables that BYOD brings to the table in order to protect corporate apps from being corrupted or even effective for corporate use.

App Developer Magazine suggests asking two essential questions when looking at this. Will the mobile environment break your apps and will the mobile apps compromise your environment?

Will the mobile environment bear your apps?

“While IT may no longer be able to control the environments – it can test apps’ compatibility with those environments so that it can warn employees ahead of time when an upgrade will break the app. How IT conducts these tests is a matter of strategy. Some organizations will throw more headcount at the problem. Some will acquire new testing tools. But best practices dictate that organizations should incorporate Mobile Application Management  (MAM) into their existing Application Readiness processes so the same effort and technology solution around testing and repackaging can be used for all applications – including mobile.”

Will The Mobile Apps Compromise Your Environment?

“All organizations need to enhance their Application Readiness processes to identify the mobile apps that display behaviors that may introduce risk to corporate security and data privacy. These tests can be done manually. But Application Readiness best practices would dictate the use of tools that provide automated processes that look inside the mobile app property files and APIs to understand what features the app is accessing on the device, in order to identify apps that exhibit risky behavior. Transparency to these behaviors will help enterprises establish mobile application management policies and configuration profiles designed to reduce risk.”

Click here to read the full article and for more information on MAM and Application Readiness.