Policy First, Technology Second: Altimeter Group Tips to Enterprise Mobility Success

So your company is becoming increasingly mobile. More and more employees are bringing in personal devices and using them for business purposes. Your job is to develop an infrastructure that allows your company to utilize these devices and realize the benefits they bring while maintaining network and security integrity. You realize that the devices have the ability to serve as new access points for security threats and attacks, so what do you do? You go out and get a Mobile Device Management (MDM), Mobile Application Management (MAM) or Enterprise Mobility Management solution to manage and secure said devices, and it’s a job well done.

Not so fast. While these solutions are integral for managing device and network security, they are no silver bullet. In a new report The Altimeter Group states that developing governance, policy and informed guidelines for device use is the first step to offering controlled enterprise mobility. Once governance and policy is set and rooted within the organization, “stacking” technology behind those policies that will allow you to scale and adapt to changing enterprise mobility is the next step. They are referring to this process as developing the “Mobile Control Plane”, which they define as “A platform made up of two parts: 1) governance for informed policy, and 2) a modular technology stack that takes into account devices, data and users.”

The report titled, Building a Solid Platform for Enterprise Mobility: Introducing the Mobile Control Plane, goes on to outline and diagram the Mobile Control Plane process highlighting that deployment will not happen at a flick of the wrist, but over a period of time. As the control plane is developed over time it allows you to “stack” or add on technology that aligns with evolving mobility needs while sticking to governance and policy that was set at the beginning of the process.

Check out the full report and understand that while MDM, MAM and EMM solutions are very important, there is much more to providing productive enterprise mobility than just those solutions.