What Does Enterprise Mobility Mean?
Enterprise mobility solutions (also known as business mobility) is one of the trending technologies in the business world that offer businesses remote working options, permit the use of personal laptops, computers and mobile devices for business purposes.
The data access is slowed to the users through cloud technology. Enterprise mobility has understood that the market is in dire need of a solution that offers greater agility that will come with a shift from the traditional central office business model to a cloud-based business model.
There is no doubt that the invention and use of smartphones have changed the way we conduct business and perform business transactions and operations. Mobile devices offer a better user-experience and scope for better return on investment. As per multiple surveys done for enterprise mobility, it is clear that more number of people prefer to use the internet on mobile devices than those people who rely on computers to access the internet. This has emphasised the need to deploy mobility for people and business processes.
Enterprise mobility management is a bunch of technologies and services developed to keep corporate data protected on staff’s mobile devices. EMM can be available in multiple suits, however, it usually comes in a suite of mobile management tools that offer protection to the intellectual property; certain business processes. It ensures the safety of data and those systems that have to be integrated with broad enterprise level IT clusters in order to address widely spread concerns.
Usually, whether a certain kind of EMM system would work for anyone company or not is based on the specific needs of that company. What is working for one enterprise might not necessarily work for the other! While some enterprises will have to freeze the use of employee devices; other enterprises may pay attention to the safety of only specific applications. Some enterprises will focus on data alone.
However, the proven fact is that many enterprises now believe in the use of EMM solutions to allow their employees to work while on-the-go.
As per David Johnson, who holds an important position at Forrester Research. Enterprise Mobility Management at one point was only about application management & mobile devices, but in the present time, it is all about offering even wider mobility across devices and platforms like Windows 10 and MacOS devices, access & identity management, and how to create engaging and productive experiences for staff.”
As per Gartner, though EMM offers a wide range of services, many of the vendors in the market provide a small fraction of those solutions as per the requirements of the enterprises. Enterprise mobility management is transforming as a unified endpoint management, as the managers use EMM to help a wide range of device platforms, such as Android, iOS, macOS and other devices.
No wonder that Enterprise Mobility Management and its offshoots have been changing and hence it is becoming hard to sort out all the solutions it offers.
The benefits of deploying Enterprise Mobility Solutions with your enterprise:
- Efficient data collection
Data plays an important role in any business model. Deploying mobility solutions help an enterprise efficiently gather data through various data touchpoints on the mobile app. It also helps in managing the large collected data to offer improved and value-added services to the clients.
As enterprise mobility solutions let you keep track of the collected data, it also allows you to make more informed and data-driven businesses decisions quickly in terms of performance, productivity, etc.
- Increase productivity
Enterprise mobility allows your employees to work from anywhere using any computer device. It also allows employees to have access to the crucial and concerns business data at any time irrespective of the location. Businesses can connect to their employees without having to worry about geographical distance and time. This means every business stakeholder can work with full flexibility. This flexibility in turn adds to productivity and that too without letting the employees suffer for it and without compromising the security of the data
- Mitigates operational cost
As a business, you must have spent huge chunks of money in building robust company infrastructure and must have been incurring costs for its maintenance too. But installing enterprise mobility saves you from all these expenses as your staff no longer needs physical infrastructure, it is operating remotely from home. Also, in case a situation arises when an employee has to visit the office in person, Enterprise Mobility Management (EMM) solution will use its workspace collaboration feature to allow the use of a mobile environment across various platforms and devices.
- Customer satisfaction
Irrespective of the area is an operation, no business can survive longer without customer satisfaction and customer loyalty. Customer service matters to every business. A custom software development company builds a mobile application that lets business reach their customers and be available to serve their needs 24*7. Mobile applications can be used to attain customer grievances, resolve issues, marketing attempts, offering discounts, and more, and that too in real-time. In short, mobility offers quick customer support in the least possible time, which ultimately leads to gaining customer trust. This can work along with your CRM development services.
- Enables faster reporting
Enterprise mobility can integrate seamlessly with your existing business system to allow your staff to see and share project reports and business data in real-time. Plus, employees can access these reports using any mobile device at any time, and so are you. This makes regions making the process smoother and adds to employees' performance too. A custom software development companywould help in building apps that can let you and your staff share data easily.
- Better collaboration
In small companies or startups, many employees have to work on the same project and in such a scenario it is crucial to have a don't that lets them connect with each other smoothly and regularly. Enterprise mobility solutions allow employees to update their daily/weekly/monthly progress and communicate continuously. It allows them to import crucial data from other business systems. Better collaboration means better flow of data, which means better insights and a base to make more improved decisions. This system turns out to be useful especially when your employees are travelling and out of physical reach.
- Data security
Every enterprise in today's world has to be conscious and cautious when it comes to data security. Data is the fuel of the present world and business can make or break anything with the help of accurate data that is made available at the right time. Enterprise mobility management along with other business security solutions like identity and access management (IAM), or Mobile Device Management (MDM) among others provide your business with all the required data security and takes care of the risk management process. EMM and other solutions also offer a safe communication platform that allows only verified staff to access business data, saving companies from fraudulent data breach attempts.
How EMM progressed from BYOD
The growth of bring-your-own-device (BYOD) programs was the reason why the EMM market emerged and spread so widely post the introduction of the first ever iPhone in the year of 2007. While more and more businesses are trying to be more flexible they have to let their employees work with utmost flexibility too. During this process of adapting to flexible work policies, businesses looked with hope at EMM so that they can overcome the pain points to let employees access business data with their individually owned devices.
If we go by the statement made by Raul Castañon-Martinez of 451 Research, we have to accept that EMM has transformed drastically from a mere mobile device management solution to a more comprehensive set of tools.
Technically sound companies look at EMM as a tool that can be leveraged to perform activities that goes above and over management and be more flexible and productive by mitigating employee workload.
Read the blog- Top Devastating Mobility Management Mistakes That Your Business Must Take Steps to Avoid Making
Application of EMM
In the real business world, EMM can be used in different ways. CIO at Motorola Solutions, Freg Meyers had to take care of cluterry experience in container services. Now, rather than running small islands of EMM services rendered from various vendors, Motorola Solutions uses the Google Device Manager for the Android platform and iOS devices. Greg says that this is the way of getting the visibility of how any mobile device is used, it automatically incorporates a Motorola guest iwireless system of our offices, but it also offers us the ability to freeze a device if needed. He also said that the company prefers the approach of a policy manager rather than a full container because it offers the company the needed security along with a better user experience.
This real-life example and use of enterprise mobility can give you an idea of how a solution can bring considerable changes in even big organisations.
What is the future for the EMM market?
451 Research states that the total worldwide revenue of EMM will increase at a compound annual growth of 25% throughout the year of 2021, the revenue can jump to $16.29 billion in 2021.
Above, we have talked in detail about the benefits, growth and future of Enterprise Mobility Solutions and EMM. However, this new technology cum solution has its challenges too.
Cybercrimes are increasing day by day. Even big names in the IT sector like eBay, Target among others have been a victim of hacking attempts. Forget organisations, even individuals including celebrities have suffered due to this. Hackers have stolen their personal photographs and made them online. Even cloud-based solutions are not an exception to it.
So if you are an asp .net development services provider or a CRM Development Company, you will have to accept the fact that even a robust enterprise mobility system is not safe from such attacks. Such systems will be prone to data hack and other security breaches. Here are the top three safety threats faced by businesses while deploying and using mobility strategies:
1) Device Loss/Theft
Enterprise mobility leverages Bring Your Own Device trend. But in this way, the organization will have to deal with as many mobile devices as the number of employees, may be more than that. Usually, mobile devices have a storage capacity ranging between 32GB – 64GB. In case any of the devices get stolen or lost, imagine the amount of data that the company might have to lose just because the device is gone.
Ponemon Institute conducted a study that predicted that even if one business file is gone, a company can witness a setback of $250. One more survey was conducted by Symantec, it states that a business bound to lose around $429,000 due to a security breach. For a small business, this figure is around $126,000.
Though it is not in the business's hands when and where the individual mobile device of the employee gets lost, there has to be a protocol that will reduce the damage in such scenarios. Installing file management app or software is one way
2) Mobile Applications
Our personal life revolves around ken or another mobile application. As per the research an average smartphone user has around 33-60 apps on its device. These apps can be used for shopping, gaming, studying, entertainment, business, anything. But the fact is, mobile apps are posing a threat to the enterprise simply by being available to users on their mobile phones.
This threat comes from the fact that many of these apps ask for permissions such as permission to access phonebooks, permission to access galleries, location, camera, etc. These permissions can be misused by hackers to build an unapproved or unverified passage into Enterprise Mobility solutions.
Another threat comes in the form of exposing company networks or business systems to malware. App management technology can be used to mitigate these risks to a certain extent. A sophisticated and efficient mobile app management system will secure applications installed on the employees' mobile phone by verifying user identity.
Last but not least is access control
BYOD culture makes it hard for organizations to monitor and track every device that has access to the company’s network. To avoid risk or threat that may arise due to security breaches unauthorized access control is completely avoided by using a 2 layer authentication process and more.