Enterprise mobility continues to be one of the hottest and most debated topics in 2014. With the rising dominance of smartphones and other mobile devices in every walk of our life, there is a growing consensus about BYOD becoming more of an obligation rather than a challenge. And this makes it important for enterprises to accept this so-called obligation as an opportunity to transform into productivity.
Trends: Enterprise Mobility Strategies For 2014
With more and more employees in an organization accessing cloud services, enterprise mobility refers to this paradigm shift in business practices where employees can carry their work outside the workplace and access secure corporate data to conduct day-to-day business. Studies have revealed that Enterprise mobility besides making employees more productive also increases security concerns.
- Fig: Enterprise Mobility Trends – At a Glance
Wireless Infrastructure
With most organizations intending to imbibe enterprise mobility in 2014, it is important for IT teams to deploy a universal wireless infrastructure that serves both business and personal devices. While we can expect wireless LANs to provide fast, anticipated behavior; there is increased possibility for network management and problem diagnosis to become more complex.
Moreover, there remains a possibility to be bogged down by issues such as poor performance, insufficient coverage or lack of provision for employee individual devices – since most wireless LANs are not planned to deliver mission-critical services.
Focus on UX in Mobile app development
Recent trends have shown UX emerge as a measure of success for virtually every mobility project. However, it is a pity that not much importance to UX is given in the development of business-to-employee (B2E) application, and employees really have to deal with some half-heartedly built, poorly designed and outdated mobile apps. 2014 might see a progressive trend in mobile app development, so as to avoid security risks arising out of some ‘shadowy’ IT activities.
Implement Identity and Access Management
Security as always is the primary concern in implementation of enterprise mobility; however, with proper identity and access management (IAM), enterprises must be able to authenticate users and grant access to the appropriate business resources. While implementation of IAM will give you adaptive access control, it again utilizes additional contextual information such as user location, behavioral patterns and many other factors, which can be used to enhance identity assurance and reduce mobile usage risk.
Emergence of EMM
The year 2014 is also expected to witness the emergence of cloud-based Enterprise Mobility Management (EMM) solutions. Going with the current BYOD trend, businesses require an EMM solution that is easy to deploy and manage. Not only does it save you from any big upfront costs, it also satisfies the needs of their employees without compromising the businesses security requirements.
Managing BYOD responsibly
With mobile revolution influencing the way people collaborate, communicate, create and share content on the cloud, there remains the concern of enterprise security being put to risk. However, with more and more enterprises considering the integration of mobile-enabled enterprise social networks at workplace in 2014; BYOD is undoubtedly pitted to be the biggest change in client computing.
This calls for a more responsible handling of the situation by management and IT team to collaborate with employees and business managers, so as to proactively create policies, implement programs and keep anticipating future BYOD requirements.
Emergence of the COPE Model
The COPE (Corporate Owned, Personally Enabled) model is fast gaining popularity in the BYOD world, as it promises to fix some of the concerns related to it. The USP of the COPE model is that it offers enterprises a unique way of supporting consumerization. Here, you can give back some control to IT and improve productivity by allowing them to use devices of their choice. Industry experts believe 2014 will see an influx of organizations adopting COPE as it promises to provide end-users with more flexibility; while organizations still keeping control over costs, security, and other areas of potential risk.
Doing away with Security concerns
With enterprise mobility posing threat to security of confidential data stored in the cloud, new enterprise mobility trends in 2014 will open up measures for many cross-platform security controls, such as authentication, encryption, device wipe and anti-malware. Even though providing uniform security across platforms and OS might prove to be a tough proposition; in short cloud security must be evaluated as a component of an overall mobile strategy.
SYNOPSIS
Even though enterprise mobility can have altogether different inferences for different people, one of the prime purposes it serves is enabling employees to access corporate data and work from mobile devices outside office; or bring their own device to the workplace. Enterprise mobility in 2014 reiterates the need for enterprises to understand its benefits and embrace it as today’s fast-paced business environment relies heavily on the availability and access to the latest information in real-time.
Optimism is high as 2014 is slated to be the year when mobile enterprise applications will emerge as the force that will drive Enterprise Mobility into the future – creating new ways of working and transforming existing business processes.
