How to Design and Implement an Effective MDM Policy

Mobile device management (MDM) encompasses technologies and practices to manage mobile devices in a business infrastructure. Enterprises are adopting mobility solutions to take advantage of what the advantages mobile devices can provide for a company. However, if you use mobile devices in your organization, you need to properly manage those devices to ensure that they don’t cause problems for you. As such, the need to create an effective MDM policy is critical for businesses.

An MDM policy is designed to help enterprises secure and protect its mobile devices and make sure that its employees are using them correctly. Mobile devices, if left unchecked, can pose a big risk to your enterprise’s data and information. Below, we’ll explain how your enterprise can design and implement an effective MDM policy.

Establishing what devices are appropriate for an MDM policy

When your business decides to incorporate mobile devices into its infrastructure, it can’t just allow any mobile device to access corporate data. There are several kinds of mobile devices on the market and not all of them are designed to handle business tasks. Businesses are typically eager to accept smartphones, tablets, and computers accessing business data if they’re secured, updated, and approved by the company. However, other mobile devices (including gaming devices, smart watches, and media devices like MP3 players) aren’t as secure; these devices shouldn’t be used for company tasks.

Your enterprise might decide to only accept a certain brand and/or type of mobile device for business tasks. If so, it should figure out which device it wants to use before it fully enacts its mobility solutions.

Defining the process of device approval

The most important part of a MDM policy is establishing the process your enterprise needs to take to get a mobile device approved. Once you’ve figured out what kinds of devices your enterprise is willing to accept, you need to outline how a device is going to be approved for business use. This approval process should confirm that the device is the right model and running the correct operating system; it should also not contain any applications or data that suggests that the phone isn’t secure.

Assigning employees responsibilities using an MDM policy

Part of mobile device management involves setting rules for your employees. If you’re entrusting a business-critical mobile device to a worker, you need to be able to trust them with it even as they take it out of the office. You also need to enforce these responsibilities to ensure that every user is operating them correctly. Employee responsibilities can include restrictions on applications, website or network access, data usage, etc.

Designing security practices

Mobile security should never be ignored, especially when adopting mobility solutions into your infrastructure. Securing your mobile devices means keeping security threats from entering a mobile device from external sources (unsecured networks, shadow IT usage, shady applications, etc.); it also aims to prevent these threats from accessing a business network if they infiltrate a device. In addition to endpoint security solutions, your business should also make installing a native security application on all enterprise mobile devices mandatory in order for the device to be accepted.

If you want to learn more about the benefits of enterprise mobility management, you should check out our free 2019 MDM Buyer’s Guide. We profile the top vendors in the mobile device management field, their key capabilities, and our Bottom Line for each.