Bring-your-own-device (BYOD) is here. Roughly 75 percent of businesses polled by the Aberdeen (News - Alert) Group earlier this year reported that they had some form of BYOD policy in place.
Yet, only half of them had any sort of substantive management of employee-owned devices, effectively casting the doors wide open for corporate data loss and security challenges.
The solution, of course, is an enterprise mobility management solution. But how to choose the right one? Here are six key considerations when taking your BYOD policy from dangerous to secure.
Focus on Current Needs. Each company is different, and this matters when it comes to enterprise mobile management. Instead of looking for every possible use case under the sun and a solution that meets them all, focus on the current needs of an organization today.
Forget Best of Breed. Focus on finding a suite of enterprise mobility management tools that is capable of meeting all the major needs of the organization instead of trying to find best-of-breed for every individual component. Except when the need is crucial, focus on a well-rounded offering that is acceptable for many needs instead of ones that are stellar in some areas and less so on others. And avoid the temptation to cobble together a solution.
User Experience Rules. BYOD puts the employee in the driver seat, and don’t forget it. If the mobility management solution is too complex, too clunky or too limiting, employees will find that it is better to keep away from BYOD policies and keep using their personal devices on an independent basis like they did before the policy. So make sure that the mobility management solution strikes a nice balance between security and ease of use.
Flexibility Matters. Just as it is important that the mobility management solution has a good user experience, it is also important that the enterprise mobility management solution chosen is flexible enough to not be too constraining for employees. The promise and impetus for BYOD is that it lets employees get things done more easily. But if a mobility management solution curtails this too much, these benefits are lost and all that is left is the complexity. So solutions need to accommodate the range of devices and applications that users actually want to use.
Converged Endpoints are the Future. Look to have solutions that are not just managing mobility, but are also managing desktops. According to some experts, mobility management should never even have been its own thing. And because of that, it is likely that the future of mobility management is actually a converged solution. When just about everything becomes mobile, separate systems stop making sense.
Future-Proof. The world of mobility management is still very much in flux, as is mobility in general. Therefore, it is important that any solution is able to grow and evolve as the technological landscape changes. Look for solutions that increasingly include new features and areas of technology. A failure to adapt is a sign that the solution will be outgrown soon.
If you follow these six keys, BYOD can look a lot less scary than it currently does to many businesses.