I recently had the opportunity to present a TMCnet webinar on the topic of Building Enterprise Mobility Strategies, during which we asked participants whether they already had a mobility strategy in place. Surprisingly, a high number of participants (60 percent) responded “yes.”
The fact that they were listening to a webinar about building a mobility strategy underscores the fact that many enterprises view their strategy as a work in progress. In my experience, I typically encounter three types of different mobility strategies when I talk to customers:
- The Unbaked Strategy, which is often a virtualized desktop strategy masquerading as a mobility strategy;
- The Half-Baked Strategy, the most common, in which an enterprise believes they have a complete mobility strategy—until they realize how many policy and connectivity issues remain unaddressed;
- And the Fully Baked Strategy, where enterprises have given deep consideration to their mobility requirements prior to building their solution.
There are likely some half-baked strategies in that 60 percent. The danger is that enterprises can’t always afford to learn from their own mistakes. Recently, an enterprise ended up in the news when, as part of its mobile device decommissioning policy, it erased the contents of company-owned devices that included personal information—which prompted ex-employees to sue the company.
Seemingly corner-case scenarios like these should in fact be part of your initial mobility strategy or it can cost you: both financially and in terms of the goodwill that exists between your company, your customers and your employees.
It’s understandable that enterprises would want to implement a mobility strategy sooner rather than later. Mobility usage is on the rise, many employees own multiple mobile devices (I myself have several that I take with me on the road) and two out of three employees use their own personal devices for work. These trends are driving the expectation that enterprises mobilize their core services and information for consumption on mobile devices. (TMCnet author Peter Bernstein discusses some of these trends in his article, “Moving Enterprise Networks Beyond Connect and Protect to Protection and Flexibility.”)
But an enterprise mobility solution isn’t the result of simply buying the right product or series of products. At AdvizeX we have access to over 100 different vendor products designed to support enterprise mobility, and there is no silver bullet among them. First you need to identify a mobility strategy before you choose products, otherwise you’re bound to find costly holes in your solution down the road.
A mobility strategy is more involved than most enterprises realize, which is why there are so many half-baked strategies. It’s also the main reason why we developed the Mobility Advizer to take enterprises through the 50+ different policy steps they need to consider to fully bake their solution. Mobility policies are the foundation for mobile considerations—wireless infrastructure, security, data management, etc. Some enterprises move forward without considering 75% of the policies they should, which creates the kind of problems that can lead to legal matters later on.
Building an enterprise mobility strategy can be a lot of work, but it doesn’t have to be. Mobility Advizer can simplify the process and help you ensure that you have the right policies and the right products in place to support your mobility needs across the six most important mobility vectors: policy, applications, devices, wireless infrastructure, security and data management.
If you’re not getting that kind of advice from your IT partner, talk to AdvizeX. ▪