If anything good came out of the COVID-19 pandemic for businesses, it’s remote connectivity. The pandemic found a large chunk of the country facing lockdowns and working from home virtually overnight.
This left IT departments scrambling to ensure that employees have the connectivity—including operational resilience, security and speed—that workers would need to perform their job away from the office.
Large organizations are now making Enterprise Mobility Management (EMM) a key objective and IT departments are prioritizing getting work mobility for their whole organization completed.
To best do this, your enterprise will want to take a look at your enterprise mobility processes and redefine them where needed. You’ll want to ensure that you provide your workers with the tools (including applications and other resources) they’ll need to link the company network with their location’s infrastructure. This needs to be done without compromising compliance requirements or data security.
The biggest challenges you’ll likely face include:
- Constant access to data
- Anywhere, anytime
- Setting it up so that various (sometimes vastly different) systems can talk to one another
- Providing a consistent UX that is intuitive
- Being able to reduce TCO to stay within a reasonable ROI
Two aspects that may keep you from achieving a seamless enterprise mobility are patch data access and poor system integration.
Patchy data access
On the user side of enterprise mobility, there are 2 basic concerns: connectivity and devices. Connectivity is an obvious concern; however, mobile carrier networks and broadband services are making it so that there are less areas that lack access to good internet.
As for devices, users won’t always have access to the newest and best devices available. Your business can get around this by providing your workers with devices to use.
On the enterprise side, it’s a bit more complex. You will have to create an EMM solution for diverse systems and have them work together. This will allow you the ability to simplify device and app management as well as configuration and operation. It will also allow your business the ability to collaborate via the internet better.
Poor system integration
System integration is also a concern for EMM. Working with diverse systems means that at least your EMM solution will need to collaborate with identity and access management (IAM), mobile application management (MAM), mobile device management (MDM), mobile information management (MIM) and unified endpoint management (UEM) systems.
This doesn’t even take into consideration apps and frameworks that allow your business core to run properly.
Modern business enterprises have become even more complex and require many systems—including CRM, ERP, GIS and more work over a hybrid cloud environment. This environment needs the ability to be automated and interconnected so that it can run properly.
With so much going on—including endpoint devices, enterprise apps as well as keeping them all synchronized—all this can make for an IT headache. This is in large part to the requirement that employees have secure access to corporate systems.