The rapid rise of mobility has created new challenges for the enterprise. To compete effectively in fast-moving markets, businesses can’t afford to restrict productivity to traditional office settings; employees need to be able to access their apps and data anywhere, on any device, to get their work done. However, meeting this demand is more difficult than ever.
For instance, we work with a number of police departments around the world. Traditionally, they have all relied on their officers calling into their dispatch centers for real-time information on individuals and incidents. With demand for their services increasing faster than their budgets, many agencies have seen the wait times for these calls increase to unsustainable levels. They are now empowering their officers with mobile devices to access this information themselves, but they need to ensure that this information remains secure.
To harness the power of mobility to drive business value, you need to provide the freedom of choice and great user experience employees demand, while still keeping corporate data safe. Enterprise Mobile Management (EMM) solutions can offer companies full business mobility by providing complete, integrated and scalable solutions for delivering apps and data to any device, paired with the high-performance experience employees demand and the security IT requires. This allows decision makers within organizations to empower complete employee mobility without putting corporate data at risk.
Yet, it is important to understand the entire EMM landscape in order to choose the right vendor to best fit your company’s needs. There are numerous market players and solutions available for managing enterprise mobility, and preventing data loss and mobile threats. With this in mind, coupled with building on lessons learned working closely with hundreds of IT teams eager to secure app and data delivery as part of their enterprise mobility strategy, here are the top five reasons why mobile data protection matters:
- BYOD erodes IT control – No longer can IT specify and control every user device in the enterprise. A key element of consumerization, as well as bring-your-own-device (BYOD), improves productivity, flexibility satisfaction by letting people use their own favorite devices for work—but it also raises significant security concerns. IT needs to be able to provide access to apps and data from untrusted devices without compromising data protection.
- People need access to more types of apps – The first wave of business mobility focused on mobile email—but we’ve come a long way since then. Full productivity now depends on mobile access to Windows, web and native mobile apps distributed widely across the cloud and in the datacenter. That’s a much more complex landscape to secure.
- Shadow IT puts data at risk – Employees under pressure don’t always stop to think about the security implications of their decisions. When an IT-sanctioned solution isn’t readily at hand, they’ll do whatever it takes to get their work done—even if that means using cloud services that aren’t under company control, or cutting and pasting content into unprotected apps. Their determination is admirable, but it comes at a high cost to security.
- Risk never rests – The mobilization of people and data comes in the context of unprecedented risks, from third-party hackers and malicious users attempting to steal company data, to the potential for inadvertent data loss that can lead to devastating regulatory fines 24×7 365 days a year. Many enterprises have turned to solutions for mobile device management (MDM) solutions or enterprise mobility management (EMM) to address data and app security. While these technologies have their uses, they are not enough to deliver apps securely across every device people use continuously while addressing needs for performance, manageability and future expansion.
- IoE enables increased access points – The ‘Internet of Things’ (IoT) focuses on how a particular gadget (‘thing’) can add a new or interesting connection to an individualistic setting, e.g. making your thermostat smarter. Yet, the real opportunity for IoT is moving broadly beyond things and more on how IoT can solve complex problems by integrating everything together. That’s IoE. Ultimately, sensor data allows for more mobile apps and capabilities to be put to work in a wider range of form factors to drive business value. However, the more devices there are connected to each other and to information, the greater the chance that they’ll be vulnerable to attacks, hacks and leaks. Making sure these data flows are secure represents new security challenges that will not be just about devices and data, but will be increasingly about people as well.
In all, Mobility is a critical requirement for today’s organizations, especially since 90% of smartphone use is messaging related. By making it possible for employees to work wherever they are, on the devices of their choice, businesses can increase productivity, agility and competitiveness. But, enterprise mobility can’t come at the expense of data protection. IT needs to be able to keep corporate data secure at all times wherever and however people work—even while using their own personal devices—and for every type of application they use.
If done right, your enterprise mobility strategy will be able to increase both employee satisfaction and productivity in order to help your business thrive.
Contributed by: Rajiv Taori. As the VP, Product Management, Mobile Platforms Group at Citrix, Rajiv Taori is responsible for heading the products team for mobile device management, mobile application management, and mobile PIM applications. Prior to joining Citrix in 2013, he was the founder and CEO at MobileOps, which pioneered mobile app management and mobile app analytics solutions for enterprises. Previously, Rajiv led product and client engagement teams at Oracle, Mercury Interactive, and McKinsey & Company.
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