5 Ways to Improve Your Enterprise Mobility Strategy
How can your enterprise improve its mobility strategy? As companies deploy more and more mobile devices into their infrastructure, IT admins and professionals need to have a solid enterprise mobility strategy in place. Mobile devices provide employees with a variety of new possibilities for their work. However, businesses must be prepared to deal with the security, productivity, and financial risks that mobile devices introduce.
If your company doesn’t have an enterprise mobility strategy — or it does have one, but you feel it isn’t effective — then you need to plan out how your mobile solutions should be operated. Below, we’ve listed five ways your company can improve your enterprise mobility strategy, including essential factors and concerns to consider!
Looking for more information on enterprise mobility management? Our free 2019 Buyer’s Guide contains profiles on the top vendors in the mobility management field and their key features and functions. It also lists questions you should ask yourself and prospective vendors before you choose a solution.
Determine which mobile devices your company will support
There are a countless number of different mobile devices currently on the market. When you decide to deploy mobile devices, you need to identify which mobile devices will work for your business needs. Can your company support both iOS and Android devices? The answer may depend on the mobile applications your enterprise deploys and whether or not they work on either iOS or Android. This is critical in writing out a bring your own device (BYOD) policy, as your company needs to know what devices its employees are allowed to bring in.
Establish ownership of devices
One of the most important questions to ask when deploying mobile devices into your infrastructure is “who owns the devices?” Traditionally, enterprises maintained strict ownership over devices that employees used. However, since BYOD and other deployment models — like choose your own device (CYOD) and corporate-owned, personally-enabled (COPE) — have gained so much traction, businesses are more willing to put more responsibility in the employee’s hands. Your enterprise mobility strategy should state who’s in charge of the device and what liabilities that ownership comes with.
Outline a specific BYOD policy
If your enterprise is BYOD-friendly, its mobile device strategy must include specific guidelines for how the BYOD program will work. This will include not just requirements for devices, but also who is in charge of approving and onboarding devices, what the enterprise and employees is responsible for, regulations that employees must follow, and penalties for users who don’t comply.
Designing remote work policies
The major benefit of mobile devices is being able to take them anywhere you want, which allows users to take their work out of the office. Your business needs to decide upfront whether or not it wants to endorse remote work for its mobile devices — and if so, what employees are allowed to do remotely. External wireless networks (especially public WiFi hotspots) could be major security risks, so you shouldn’t allow remote work unless you have a mobility management solution in place to protect corporate data.
Know what mobility management solutions you have — or need
In order to keep track of your mobile devices and secure them (and the data contained within), your enterprise needs a management solution that delivers security updates and mandates to devices. Mobility management has evolved since the days of mobile device management (MDM) products that only provided protection at the device level. Vendors have switched over to delivering enterprise mobility management (EMM) solutions, which provide additional capabilities for app, identity, and content management, among others. Looking to the future, unified endpoint management (UEM) tools seek to combine EMM suites with endpoint management functions to create a single-pane management console for all endpoints.
If your business is stuck using older MDM solution to secure its mobile device, it might be time to evaluate newer solutions. Your business needs to determine how advanced of a solution it wants to implement: consider how many management tools you already have and what mobile management capabilities your business needs. Do you want to go for a UEM vendor to manage everything, or separate management of mobile devices with EMM tools?
Looking for more info on the benefits of enterprise mobility management? You should check out our free 2019 Mobility Management Buyer’s Guide. We profile the top vendors in the mobile device management field, their key capabilities, and our Bottom Line for each.
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