How can enterprises improve their mobility strategy? This was the recent question asked by several of the leaders at the Tech Expo, where 5G devices were displayed. It was still a question of bandwidth as the businesses wanted to extend the on-premise facility to the remote workers. Technology experts around the world are stressing on the synchronization paths that will bring infrastructure, IT admins, and professionals under the single umbrella of policies.

Mobile devices are providing employees with a variety of new features to improve efficiency and productivity, while the organizations should even be ready to tackle the security and financial risks that many of the mobile devices introduce.

If your enterprise doesn’t have an enterprise mobility strategy or it does have one, most times as a leader, you feel it isn’t effective. You need to develop a complete mobility strategy with policies and technology defined to build a unified platform with devices and every data transfer.

1. Support devices

Every day a countless number of mobile devices are launched, so you need to define the device that your business will support on the network. When you adopt the mobility infrastructure in your business, you are implementing risk as the devices need to be updated. Restriction on device usage will bring ease of maintaining various security protocols and defining the policy as required. It would even be required for the business applications, whether they would work on the given platform. Bring your own Device (BYOD) is implemented by many businesses; however, having device criteria eases the requirement of such technology.   

2. Establishing the ownership for the devices

When deploying the mobile devices into your infrastructure, you need to question who owns the devices? Enterprises had initially enacted that there should be strict ownership of devices, wherein all the devices provided should be registered with the enterprise. Since BYOD was utilized, other deployment models started to stand out like Choose Your Own Device (CYOD), Corporate-Owned, Personally Enabled (COPE) and gained better traction. Using devices is putting traction as the businesses are putting more responsibility in the employee’s hands.

3. Specific BYOD policy

Many of the organizations are BYOD-friendly, while the mobile device strategy must include certain and specific guidelines for how actually the BYOD policies will work. It will include various requirements for the devices, but the admin who will be responsible for the approving and onboarding of the devices. Many of the employees who are responsible for dealing with various regulations and requirements need to develop a strategy of stages that will be approved with the following steps to improve authentication.

4. Remote work policies

Most of the devices have one benefit that they can be taken anywhere. It allows the businesses to take their benefit from increasing their productivity with complete working out of their office. Your business needs to decide upfront whether or not it wants to endorse remote work for its mobile devices, and what the employees mostly invest their time in, remotely. External wireless networks, especially with public Wi-Fi hotspots, could be one of the major security risks.  

5. Mobility management solutions

In order to keep a better track of all the devices, secure them, your enterprise needs a management solution that delivers security updates and mandates to devices. Mobility management has evolved; we started when we were mostly based on Mobile Device Management (MDM) products that only provided protection only at the device level. Vendors have switched over to delivering Enterprise Mobility Management (EMM) solutions that provide an additional facility for application, identity and content management among others. Unified Endpoint Management (UEM) tools provide a combination of EMM suites along with endpoint management functions to create a single-pane management console for all the different endpoints.

If your business is stuck using the legacy MDM solutions to secure many of the mobile devices, it might be better to use the newer solutions. Your needs to determine which will be a better solution based on your infrastructure requirements, what are the current management tools you have, and what mobile management capabilities your business needs.  

Conclusion

Mobility management solutions are a variable challenge; it’s based on threats and technology of implementation. If your enterprise is pushing for the mobility solutions, then what are the underlying policies that need to be built in terms of devices, platform, and application, before being added with solutions. To know more about mobility solutions, you can download our latest whitepapers on Mobility.