Mobility in the enterprise is not a new phenomenon.
For years, enterprises have supported employee mobility through WiFi networks, and mobile phones and laptops have long been an important part of the business road warrior’s arsenal. Yet enterprises today are entering a new era of mobility as more applications and communications travel across multiple networks and through the Cloud.
Enterprises, in reality, have little choice over whether they will embrace this new world of mobility or not. With the rapid rise in smartphones and the shift toward video in favor of audio-only communications, enterprise must find ways to support more wireless traffic and more mobile devices. Yet enterprises do have a choice over how they support them: through corporate-controlled devices or by allowing employees to use their own personal mobile devices for business purposes, a trend known as Bring Your Own Device or BYOD.
Corporate-controlled mobility strategies and BYOD strategies provide many of the same benefits to enterprises. Both strategies enable more responsive customer service, empower employees to be productive and informed wherever they are, allow businesses to serve different geographies more efficiently and, as an additional benefit, open the door for companies to acquire and retain talent from a broader pool of people. Mobility, however, can also open the door to greater security risks and more operational complexity.
Those enterprises that choose a corporate mobility strategy have greater control over the kinds of devices they support and what kinds of applications those devices can access. This strategy can come at a higher cost to enterprises, however, both in terms of capital costs (for the devices themselves) and the operational costs of managing and updating software and applications on each device.
Most enterprises today are moving toward a BYOD model, largely due to the inherent cost savings and the ubiquity of mobile devices in our lives. Determining the best practices for a successful BYOD deployment is still a challenge for many enterprises, for the simple reason that BYOD itself is a fairly new trend. Through multiple customer engagements, AdvizeX has developed advisory services (available through our Mobility Advizer) that outline the questions that every enterprise should ask before they decide to bring BYOD into their network.
Over the next few blogs, I’ll be covering these areas in more detail:
- Mobility device management
- Mobile application delivery
- Policy and compliance
- Wireless infrastructure
- Secure data access
- Mobile data management
It’s my hope that, after reading this series, you’ll have a solid understanding of the questions and the answers you’ll need to create a successful BYOD strategy for your enterprise.
Coming Soon: “BYOD Part 1: Enabling Mobility Without Disabling Security.” ▪