Mobility results in improved productivity, efficiency, flexibility, and satisfaction.
Accelerating production of powerful smartphones and tablets.
Accelerating number of enterprise apps developed for smartphones and tablet computers.
Across-the-board mobile life-style and culture shift.
Need to access enterprise data and tools at any time, from anywhere, and from multiple devices.
Trends toward consumerization of IT.
Trends toward employees bringing their own devices (BYOD) to the workplace.
Improved productivity is the common feature of all of these use cases:
Managers use mobile dashboards to access information, reports, schedules, and contacts to make key decisions away from the office.
Telecommuting employees access enterprise data, back-end and on-device apps, and attend or host online meetings from anywhere.
Sales agents in the field increase customer intimacy, access CRM, data, forms, and presentations from anywhere.
Technicians in the field deliver rapid actionable information to the point of decision.
Warehouse workers access and update inventory data.
Healthcare workers bring data and forms to their patients.
Education suppliers and consumers access data and collaborate from anywhere.
Transportation workers access and track up to date data.
Military personal and law enforcement officers improve communications and collaboration.
Enterprise mobility management (EMM) is the set of people, processes, and technologies required to enable secure mobile enterprise computing. Users can be located within or outside the corporate firewall and may be working with their own personal smartphones and tablets.
Mobile Lifecycle Management (MLM) is a term that describes these two processes:
Mobile Hardware/Device Lifecycle
Mobile Software/Application Lifecycle
Enterprise mobility management should include all of the following:
Mobile application management (MAM):
Public or private enterprise app stores that enable mobile device owners to discover, add, remove, and update mobile enterprise applications using mobile broadband and/or Wi-Fi.
An enterprise app store should support user and role management to allocate access privileges.
Mobile device management (MDM):
Manages physical devices as part of the mobile device lifecycle.
Visibility as to how the devices are accessing the network: mobile broadband, Wi-Fi, LAN.
Device purchases, provisioning/deprovisioning, device retirement and replacement.
Location of the devices.
Remote lock and wipe. Device wipe feature may differentiate between erasing corporate and/or personal data.
Remote firmware update and device configuration.
Backup and restore environment.
Policy enforcement, logging, audit, reporting.
Patch management.
Mobile inventory management (MIM):
Who is accessing enterprise systems and resources and with which devices.
Mobile security management (MSM):
Authentication, authorization, accounting.
Encryption of communications and data.
Mobile expense management (MEM):
The ability to track and manage expenses for mobile devices.
Mobile Cloud storage management:
Enterprises can move applications, processing, and storage that previously existed on the client into the enterprise cloud.
Trends toward consumerization of IT and bring your own device (BYOD) add new challenges to managing employee owned devices. When a company plans to support a “bring your own device” (BYOD) policy, it still must secure its data and ensure that it meets regulatory compliance.
Today, there are billions of mobile application downloads from app stores every year. This will grow from a consumer-only phenomena to an enterprise focus. Mobile workers need accurate, real-time information about their customers, products, inventories, pricing and enterprise data with a high level of security.
IT departments are now developing custom applications and making plans to create or license corporate app stores for employees to download approved software.
IT departments can purchase or build cloud-based enterprise mobile device and app management platforms. Can public app stores provide similar comprehensive EMM services?
The current generation of mobile smartphones and tablet computers in the hands of billions of people has set the stage for them to become a universal computing platform and essential tool for modern life.