Mobile Device Mess?

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?