Before delving into the idea of management, you need to get a grasp of what it is that you will be managing in the first place. “Enterprise mobility” may sound like a vague and fluffy label of the business world, and not everyone may know it even exists. This is understandable, as it only appeared and began expanding after the digital world became widely accessible and so wildly influential. Fortunately, at its core, it is fairly easy to understand.
What is enterprise mobility?
To keep it down to plain English, “enterprise mobility” is a relatively recently coined term which is used to describe a marked shift in people’s work habits all around the globe. The change in question is this: more and more employees in all niches are opting to work out of office, for various reasons. These people rely on cloud-based tools and storage services to manage their tasks and they use their mobile devices (phones as well as others) to tackle their day to day work load.
This new trend brings along its own challenges, and one of the greatest concerns is exposing company data to security risk. Imagine having your company’s financial information whizzing between a hundred phones in busy city streets! The purpose of enterprise mobility management (EMM) is to minimize such risks.
So what is EMM at the end of the day?
When you boil it down to the essentials, enterprise mobility management is the approach that a given enterprise takes in order to let all of their employees use smart phones, tablets etc. to work over wireless networks, while at the same time making certain that said networks are secure.
The key concern is maintaining high security of all data that is used and exchanged between all devices involved in the enterprise. Since a given employee may need to replace their personal device at any moment, on short or no notice, many companies have opted for internal devices instead. A number of company-owned and enterprise-bound devices are distributed among the employees to be used for mobile work only, reducing risks that come with one’s personal device being damaged, stolen etc.
What constitutes EMM technology?
Keeping several dozens, or hundreds, or even thousands of devices safe, and keeping all the data being circulated between them secure is no small task by any means. For this reason, most EMM plans combine a few different specific strategies to make sure they cover all of their bases.
The three major strategies that most companies rely on are mobile device management (MDM), mobile application management (MAM), and mobile information management (MIM). Each has a single point of focus which is meant to increase security. Here is a brief explanation of all three of them.
Mobile device management (MDM) focuses on the security of the devices themselves. This usually means that there is a system in place for locking down all mobile devices in the event that some kind of a breach, loss, or damage should occur.
Mobile application management (MAM) focuses on the security levels are assigned to the users of applications. It restricts the number of people who can access certain apps and determines who can access exactly what. It is all about access pipework. Click here to learn more.
Finally, mobile information management (MIM) places its focus on the actual company data itself. It goes beyond surveying the human participants in the process and deals directly and exclusively with the software. In short, MIM is aimed at applications, and this strategy is used to determine trusted and approved applications which can be allowed to access or transmit corporate information.
Successfully balancing out these three will usually cover all bases and resolve any security issues that enterprise mobility might bring about. However, they are rather interdependent, and failing one tends to send the other two tumbling downhill. Therefore, the true goal is to successfully manage all three, independently and in combination.
What are some “good EMM practices”?
Rather disappointingly, there are none. This is not to say that the enterprise mobility management ideas are ineffectual in “real life”, nor that the whole notion is too young to properly analyze. No, the problem is the fact that it is so heavily context-dependent.
At the end of the day, a company is comprised of individuals and their relationships; therefore there is no one cemented approach that can serve as a universal template. Your neighbor’s most successful EMM strategy could easily spell disaster for you.
To find what works best for your own enterprise, there is only the trial and error method. Give MDM, MAM, and MIM a shot, or even consider outsourcing it, and see what yields you the optimal result.
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nice
Perfect information, thank you
Perfect information, thank you