IT Insight Into Mobility Critical to Future Growth
April 27, 2016
By Susan J. Campbell
TMCnet Contributing Editor
Mobility is a wonderful thing. It allows your employees to go where they need to go to be effective, whether that’s onsite with a client, traveling to a conference or simply working remotely because they don’t live close to your corporate headquarters. You may have a corporate plan that provides for mobile devices for all of your staff, or maybe you’ve embraced the concept of a Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) policy. Either way, IT needs to look at the importance of call accounting and gain a better understanding of mobile use.
Mobile users aren’t just making phone calls when they’re on the move. They’re messaging, accessing emails, interacting with your server, downloading apps and more. They’re also likely using hot-spots that don’t offer the kind of protection your IT would prefer, many offer no protection at all and any information shared over that network is exposed. As 35 percent of experts consider enabling a mobile workforce to be a business-critical enterprise initiative for 2016, according to this Baseline Mag report, it’s time to put some policies in place.
The report highlights the findings from the 2016 Business Transformation and User Experience Trends Survey from Aternity (News - Alert). These initiatives are being put in place for a number of reasons. Among executives who were surveyed, 29 percent would like to improve end-user experience visibility and another 20 percent said they’d like these tools to increase productivity among the workforce. Among the drivers behind these demands for workforce visibility are the need for end-user computing and IT convergence, as well as mobility and cloud management.
As to the best deployment strategy, 82 percent said their company already allows some or all of their employees to use their own devices for work. Yet half of the respondents reported that their organization isn’t ready to manage mobile apps and devices. The frustration surrounding workforce productivity include determining the source of performance issues at 34 percent, finger-pointing between departments at 26 percent and 23 percent see diagnosing issues as disrupting the workforce.
The survey found, however, that by 2018, 90 percent of mobile data will come from the cloud and by 2019, 90 percent of all organizations will have personal data on IT systems that they do not control or own. This points to IT making it a priority now to get a better handle on mobility. They need not only insight into how users are accessing the network, but also how they handle that information while outside of the corporate firewall.
Putting a call accounting solution in place that supports mobility is a great first step. IT leaders would gain visibility and eliminate some of the problems already being caused by a lack of understanding. While it’s only the first step in what needs to happen, it’s an important one.
Edited by Stefania Viscusi