Enabling employees to work as effectively outside as inside the office remains a wish rather than a reality for many businesses. To do that today requires much more than a voice connection; they need access to the enterprise’s business systems and collaboration tools.
However, between the marketing claims and the practical reality of enterprise mobilization lies a vast gap, the mobilization gap. This No Jitter Article reviews the gap, the marketing fluff that tries to fill that gap, then reviews a real-world success case with Eli Lilly’s mobilization project using Layer 7‘s mobile access gateway, and finished on some common practices and trends in enterprise mobilization:
- Guidelines for BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) must clearly articulate the responsibilities of users and the enterprise, based on the organization’s business requirements and risk profile.
- Common device wipe policies must be implemented across all BYOD mobile device types until more effective mobile device management (MDM) solutions become available.
- There must be control of devices that download business data and applications, using an MDM tool that provides access control policies, proactive status reporting and root detection.
- Employees should be segmented into groups based on their role and their need to access corporate systems with personal devices. Then provide access and support appropriate for each group. Policy control here is critical.
- Enterprise mobility management (EMM) platforms have emerged, providing businesses with a more flexible way of combining, integrating and utilizing modular enterprise services. These emerging platforms, exemplified by Layer 7, BoxTone, Antenna Software and SAP, will also allow management of security, policy and compliance across these integrated capabilities.
- Enterprise Mobilization is about to become one of the most competitively fought of all enterprise software markets. This not only will encourage consolidation, but will also bring traditional enterprise software vendors, mobile OSs/devices, systems integrators, cloud providers and mobile operators into the battle.
I see specialist mobile-only solutions as being at a competitive disadvantage, providing a partial solution to the enterprise, forcing silo’ed solutions as the market moves rapidly to integrated solutions. The bottom line is it’s all about computing devices accessing enterprise systems with adequate security and under policy control.
Even devices behind the enterprise firewall are not without risk. To mind the mobilization gap requires us to realize it’s a solution across all enterprise devices, not just what we consider “mobile” devices.
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