Enterprise mobility management, typically abbreviated to EMM, is a relatively young technology, but it is becoming increasingly more crucial to any business entity that aspires to success.
The reason is pretty simple: more and more employees prefer to work out of office, taking their jobs on the go in order to maximize productivity and save themselves, and their employers, some precious time. To learn more about this new way of work, you can visit this link: https://www.clicksoftware.com/blog/what-is-enterprise-mobility-an-enterprise-mobility-definition/
With remote work setups on the rapid rise, companies have concluded that they have to adapt to this new trend among their workers, but in a way that will maintain the safety and security of sensitive or confidential corporate data. Trying to fulfill both of these interest is what created EMM, and this is the basic need that all EMM solutions vendors have to provide for. Read on for some tips on how to choose the right provider for you.
Start by evaluating your actual mobility needs
Before you start googling for service vendors, you need to take some time, sit down with your inner circle of colleagues, and put down on a piece of paper what exactly the company needs and exactly how much of it do you need to apply. There are some basic questions that you can answer to give yourself a framework for making that decision. For example:
How broad of a scope do you need to cover? The whole enterprise or just a few key departments? On what scale do you need your employees to be mobile? Are their own habits dictating that? What applications and programs do you globally use in your business? Which levels of the corporate structure have access to sensitive or confidential data?
Take into account the budget you can invest in this, and how many staff are available to manage the transition and maintenance. Which devices are predominant in the company and what kind of software do they support? How familiar are you with your network’s security protocols? Visit this web page to learn how to check your Wi-Fi encryption type on various devices.
You may not be able to answer all of these questions, at least not right now or not in any great detail, but that is okay. Take your time to gather the information. One smart way to go about determining your needs on a practical level is to do a “pilot session”.
Deploy a possible new EMM strategy on a limited segment of the company and see how it goes. Give it a set amount of time, like a month or so, and track its performance, bottlenecks, and influence on the workflow.
Consider the level of inter-system integration
Due to the various factors that influenced its emergence and evolution, enterprise mobility management has turned out to be somewhat isolated from other “traditional“ systems of IT management.
Although they both share the key feature of placing enormous emphasis on mobility and smooth integration of the many kinds of cloud services, there is still one key factor to keep in mind: the availability of support for legacy systems.
Therefore, it is crucial that you take the time to figure out how your new EMM will fit with your previously established IT practice, your directory services, and the like. Stop and review the company’s philosophy regarding management in the IT sector. To keep the productivity of your IT department staff at its highest and keep the unavoidable costs to a minimum, you will need to work out a way to achieve maximum compatibility between the old and new managerial practice.
Evaluate all the EMM features on offer
Different enterprise mobility management vendors will naturally have different selections of features and tools on their spectrum. Some of them will offer full service suites which can do all of the work for you, whereas some others will specialize in to-the-point kind of products, developed for the purpose of resolving one or two specific situations.
One popularly offered option that sounds quite appealing is having a custom assembled set put together specifically for you. However, this is less than ideal, for three heavy reasons.
One, putting together a custom suite from scratch has a high chance of resulting in inter-set conflict: tools and features of various products could overlap, devouring more resources, or directly oppose one another, resulting in partial or total unusability.
Two, the suite can end up being based on more than one management system, which would make it unnecessarily complex and often impractical.
And three, a custom set will inherently cost far more than a premade one, will likely feature a far steeper learning curve for all the staff involved with it in any way – not to mention the operational and maintenance costs that you will be facing along the way.
Talk to several vendors before you make your choice
Considering its rapid rise and development, EMM is a big boiling pot of constant changes. Sometimes it can be difficult for vendors to keep up with it all, and often there will be someone better prepared, with a more efficient tool on offer, just a conversation away.
As with any important purchase, give yourself plenty of time to browse your options. You could even run several pilot sessions with different EMM products before you make your final decision on the investment.
