Enterprise Mobility Trends In 2014
Mobility is one of those third platform technologies, which dictates the way enterprises function. As the competition is getting fierce, the need for being always on the go and be connected while on the go, arises.
Increased enterprise mobility enables employees to do their jobs better, without being bound by location constraints. Increased efficiency leads to increased productivity and hence increased revenues. However, it has also become imperative for organizations to manage enterprise mobility well, and be responsive to the changing technologies, evolving mobility requirements and the latest enterprise mobility trends.
Trends to watch out for in 2014
Experts say that the market for enterprise mobility will remain highly competitive in 2014. This competition will lead to availability of enhanced enterprise mobility management (EMM) with tremendous capabilities at relatively low costs. EMM tools will also evolve and hence the SaaS based delivery approach will gain prominence. The increased demand for better control over applications and enterprise data, will lead to more efforts and improvements in this direction.
Set Back
The evolution and escalation of EMM technology is somehow impeded due to the lack of management API across mobile devices. While some Android devices do provide a large number of management APIs, the other device vendors are reluctant to offer the same, and are adopting a cautious and a rather slow approach.
Cloud Computing
Organizations are increasingly turning to cloud based technology. However, cloud computing provides the ubiquitous access to Internet, and this creates a complex mobility environment. It is therefore necessary for organizations to become security and cost conscious. There are three factors that demand attention,
1) Organizations need to deliver higher degree of connectivity and mobility without relying on the end users to manually select connectivity options.
2) Enterprise mobility management efforts should be directed at reducing access costs.
3) Cloud security should be implemented as an inherent part of the enterprise mobility strategy.
Mobility Strategies - Areas of Improvement
To develop improved mobility it is imperative to focus on improving identity and access management. Here, adaptive access control lies at the core. This includes tracking of user information such as location, behavioral patterns, etc., and using it to authenticate the identity of the user and also reduce the risk of unauthenticated use of mobility.
Now, commercial apps provide user experience of the highest order, however, the same kind of efforts have not been made in order to improve the user experience for B2E apps. It is now time to concentrate on this aspect. Developers should, and will focus on delivering higher user experience and making the enterprise applications more intuitive and user friendly.
Potential Challenges
Enterprises are relying on WLAN's like never before, for mission critical communications. As a result network design, network management and problem identification and analysis becomes highly complex. Unfortunately, WLAN's are inundated with problems like insufficient coverage, below average performance, and lack of service for employee's personal devices.
Bring your own devices (BYOD) is a key revolution in enterprise client computing, and dealing with BYOD strategies poses as a big challenge. Addressing these challenges involves providing improved network capacity, managing bandwidth, differentiating the BYOD devices from enterprise devices, adding IP voice servicers and expanding site mobile access.
Implementing BYOD, makes workspace delivery, information security and device management all the more challenging. Now these challenges are unavoidable, but they must be addressed at any cost. IT teams should work in collaboration with the end users and the business managers across an enterprise, they should predict BYOD requirements in advance and create policies and take measures to fulfill them.
