Mobility first appeared in the business world decades ago. With the rapid proliferation of smart devices, smartphones, tablets, and wearables, its progress accelerated exponentially. Gone are the primitive days when enterprise mobility used to focus primarily on making the corporate web page functional on a mobile device. Enterprise mobility is now a new way of doing business. But enterprise mobility forces many changes in an organization, both culturally and technically.
Enterprise mobility consulting is focused on helping enterprises achieve breakthrough growth throughout the rapidly changing mobile ecosystem. But taking a plunge into enterprise mobility solutions, it is important to start with the right foundation and backed by a holistic, shared strategy and the best-supporting technologies.
Building a Mobile Business Strategy
Enterprise mobility consulting is a crucial step to help businesses design and develop mobility solutions to drive additional business and customer value. Scope of service includes a whole range right from market assessment and sizing competitive assessments, enterprise mobility planning, and design, network infrastructure design, vertical mobility offering evaluation, mobility channel design, the employee needs evaluation, architecture/blueprint to mobility technology and device planning.
A successful mobile business strategy should be mobile-first to create serious organizational inroads that can provide new entry points for users alongside existing service offerings. The methodology can help pave the way for discovering and validating future business scenarios by reexamining how business operating model improvements can be made to improve communications, internally and externally with customers and business partners.
Here are important terms for Enterprise Mobility Development
MDM (Mobile Device Management)
MDM stands for “Mobile Device Management.” It is software that can help companies to lock down, control, encrypt, and enforce policies on mobile devices such as tablets and smartphones.
MDM allows the IT department to assume complete control over the device—IT can “own” it and essentially do whatever they want to it. But once the iPhone and Android phones came into existence, users started bringing their own personal devices into the office.
Think about it.
- If you’re an end user and you buy your own iPhone and bring it into work, would you want to give full control to your IT department?
- Do you IT to see which apps you have installed?
- Do you want IT to see where the device is at all times?
- Do you want them to have the ability to remotely wipe your entire device, including anything personal you have on there?
So while MDM worked during the nascent stage when companies owned the phones, now that users own their own phones and do some many personal things on them, MDM software comes across as a heavy approach.
MAM (Mobile Application Management)
Mobile Application Management can be applied to only particular applications on a device rather than the entire device. With MAM, an IT department could lock down, control and secure just specific corporate applications. All the other apps on the phone stay with users. The company controls all aspects such as controls, encryption, and remote wipe.
MAM lets IT encrypt only the data stored by the apps. The user’s installed apps would function as normal. For remote wiping, the company could wipe the corporate apps and data. When using MAM, the company doesn’t have visibility to anything users do outside of their apps.
Another approach MAM vendors take for application-specific security is to “wrap” regular off-the-shelf apps with their own layer of security, encryption, and control. While this sounds a novel concept, but tough in real life. The problem is that in order for the IT department to “wrap” an iOS or Android app, they have to get the app’s original package files.
MIM (Mobile Information Management)
MIM is “mobile information management” that syncs files and documents across different devices just like cloud services. The cool thing about MIM is that there are plenty of public services that users can get on their own today. Ultimately MIM products will be rolled into the larger service offerings that IT provides to users (just like email and calendar), and the client apps will be delivered to mobile devices via MDM or MAM.
BYOD (Bring Your Own Device)
BYOD is one of the concepts that started the enterprise mobility revolution. It allows end users to bring their mobile devices and access corporate information as well as company resources. It is important the companies identify whether to use MDM, MAM, and/or MIM approach when they implement BYOD programs, but the two don’t go together. Many companies allow users to sync their personal smart devices to the corporate email servers without any specific kind of MDM or MAM. While BYOD is an ownership model, MDM, MAM, and MIM are various types of software companies can buy and use.
UEM
Unified Endpoint Management is a combination of enterprise mobility management (EMM), mobile device management (MDM), and client management. Considered an evolution in the true sense, Unified Endpoint Management is a process of managing as well as securing an organization’s servers & devices from a unified console. UEM takes into account different devices and platforms to ensure seamless cross-platform security and management for IT departments, ultimately improving the scope of device administration and data security.
Enterprise Mobility Management
Enterprise mobility management (EMM) is software that allows enterprises to enable employee use of mobile devices and applications in a secure ecosystem. It is not just about security concerns, EMM also helps increase the productivity of employees, because IT departments can provide with the essential applications and data to conduct work-related tasks on mobile devices.
Conclusion
In order to build mobility solutions, find an enterprise mobility partner. who understands your business and IT ecosystem, preferably with expertise in integration, security and cross-platform mobile development.
Make sure your team can stay ahead of constant evolution. At the crux of enterprise mobility strategy is partnering with a trusted company. Many small companies might not survive in the pace of technology revolution or will be acquired by larger entities as part of marketplace consolidation, potentially jeopardizing solutions and engagements.