The pervasiveness of mobile computing is forcing companies to rethink their business models, reinvent their organizations and rewire their operations in order to reap the benefits and overcome the challenges of enterprise mobility. Where do you stand?
In today’s connected world, workers are used to doing more than one thing at a time and using technology to help them perform at their optimal levels.
Change is the only constant in the mobile workforce landscape. Rapid developments in mobile device technology are leading the way. Smartphone, tablet and laptop vendors are introducing multiple models every year, in a range of form factors, while Apple, Google and Microsoft releases frequent OS updates. Meanwhile, new vendors are entering the mobile marketplace, offering new devices, enterprise device management and security solutions. Filtering out the noise in the marketplace is no easy task.
At the same time, users are changing the ways they work. Employees are increasingly relying on mobile devices for a wider range of work functions and expecting to access corporate information anytime, anywhere. These changes in work habits can lead to new security issues. In some cases, employees are resistant to corporate security policies and corporate control if it impedes their productivity or appears to encroach on their personal privacy — users don’t want their IT department to access personal social media posts or accidentally erase personal photos stored on a device. Organizations need ways to expand access to corporate networks and increase user adoption of corporate solutions without making the organization vulnerable to a large and growing array of threats.
Balancing security with user experience – There are a few ways to implement strong security while retaining an optimum user experience such as incorporating single sign-on (SSO), innovative identity & access management and location based geo-fencing solutions.
Defining your mobile vision and business drivers will lead you and your team to many innovative app ideas. Don’t start implementing half-baked mobility plans without thinking first about desired business outcomes. It is important to define what you are trying to achieve with mobile. Are you planning to use mobile to increase revenue, shorten sales cycles, improve the customer experience or make your employees more productive? Could be all of the above. That’s a good thing.
As your organization expands support for workforce mobility, your IT environment is likely to become more complex. Administrators will need to manage more device types, operating systems and work habits, and they will employ more security and mobile device management solutions. Selecting solutions designed to control that complexity will be essential in addressing current requirements and preparing for the future while working within your resource limitations. Choosing end-to-end solutions with integrated management consoles can help significantly diminish management complexity; reducing the number of distinct consoles that administrators must use will save time and money.
The key component of ensuring that the right people have access to the right information is determining the user’s identity and enforcing proper role-based access, thereby ensuring that proper security policies are in place. Many organizations believe that mobile security should be focused on the device or the app, but you should take a more holistic view. As you expose new mobile-oriented services (such as APIs), you must secure the backend integration and the transactions that are taking place between the client and the back-end servers. Consider leveraging the right technology for securing mobile apps and associated services and standardize the security approaches, which you should build into your mobile app process.
There is a lot of focus in mobility management on managing devices, applications, and content. But the reason that you’re managing all of these things is to ensure that your people have access to the information they need while protecting your company information from exposure to an outside entity. Incorporating embedded security — security that cannot be modified or worked around by users — can help ensure the strongest protection, even as devices, work habits and threats change. Embedded security solutions can help protect data, apply the right profiles and policies to users, and secure the network.
The entire system, right from understanding the context to installing the infrastructure of the data for the UI makes up the user experience. Get them all correct and your users will be delighted to use the system. Get any piece wrong and the user experience degrades. Your consumers and employees have become savvier and expect an experience that is fluid and easy to incorporate into their daily lives. An enterprise mobile strategy must focus on design aspects of smart software or smart hardware products that will win and change the game for your employees and customers.
Establishing a Mobility Center of Excellence (MCoE) to bring together experts and stakeholders from mobile application development, IT operations and application support is the most comprehensive approach of managing, monitoring and controlling mobile applications and mobile information across their full lifecycle. Mobility CoE can help CIOs and IT managers automate key enterprise mobile management activities, mitigate security risks associated with the data loss and ensure IT security compliance. Apart from that, it can reduce the cost of supporting enterprise mobility initiatives and drive improvements in business productivity and competitiveness.
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