The Bring Your Own Device genie is out,
causing multiple headaches for IT professionals. Thankfully, applying
MDM (Mobile Device Management) can bring some relief
One man's food is
another's poison, they say. Applying this old adage to enterprise
mobility, while the proliferation of devices comes as a boon to the
touch-happy users, it is often seen as anathema to the enterprise
tech professionals.
I can almost imagine their
nightmares as streams of young new recruits (and young-at-heart
bosses) enter the office premises, playing games, chatting,
Facebooking, and occasionally answering emails or opening work
files—all on their swishy new smartphones and tablets.
The tribe of mobile
devices in our midst is growing phenomenally. Each quarter close to
150 million smartphones are sold worldwide and about three million in
India. And these numbers are growing pretty fast.
It is inevitable that
employees will walk in with their own mobile devices—and insist on
using them for work as well.
Thankfully, MDM or mobile
device management tools are now at hand. Using these tools, IT
professionals can minimize their nightmares, if not completely
eliminate them.
The problem with mobile
devices is that there are just too many of them! CIOs and IT managers
have to deal with a wide variety of OS types, software versions and
hardware models. It's not easy taming what's come to be known as the
BYOD (bring your own device) phenom, and no one seems to have found
the formula to perfectly match the best interests of the company and
its employees.
MDM tools such as those
from MobileIron, AirWatch and Zenprise (there are scores of solutions
available, including many from traditional large vendors, though only
a few are available in India at the moment) allow enterprises to
provision applications with ease and safely manage access to critical
business data.
However, challenges
persist. Key concerns include creating a standard environment,
rendering apps correctly or elegantly on multiple types of devices,
and dealing with the constant barrage of new apps that employees
would want to download and use. And then, there are issues concerning
company policies (subsidizing the costs, fixing liabilities in case
of theft, etc.) and employee turnover (managing the data/device
handover process).
Together with cloud and
social media, mobile devices and their growing use for work are
causing a complete relook of ICT infrastructure for many enterprises.
Deployment of a solution is no longer a siloed activity that can be
done on a need basis but one that is getting intertwined with other
solutions, the overall infrastructure and, of course, the company's
“agility” ambitions.
A lot of learning and pain
awaits IT folks before the device mess can be sorted out to any
desirable degree of satisfaction.
But then, what's life
without challenges?
