COVID-19 renews focus on better & secure Mobility Management strategy

Soma Tah 

The COVID-19 crisis has brought life and work to a screeching halt in its wake, but businesses managed to stay afloat, thanks to a plethora of smart devices and digital tools at their disposal.  

Cloud and Mobile technologies have enabled people to work anywhere, anytime and from any device of their choice. But they have also exposed organizations to a problem which is far more complex than it may appear.  

Managing a fleet of corporate-owned and employee-owned mobile devices and securing business data on those devices has never been an easy task for businesses anyway. But with Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) and the Consumerization of IT, businesses now have been fighting two battles at the same time. The influx of user-friendly consumer devices and applications into the corporate network have made it difficult for businesses to protect the employees from malicious attacks and prevent sensitive business data from falling into the wrong hands. The sudden switch to ‘Remote Work’ during the COVID-19 crisis has just added to the woes.   

The crisis has demonstrated the importance of always-on application availability as much of the global workforce continues to work from home, said Edgar Dias, MD, F5 Networks, India.  “Businesses have seen the urgent need to accelerate their digital transformation efforts to scale capacity for remote access and availability of their business applications without compromising on performance and security. This trend will likely continue through the post-pandemic period,” said he. 

Ananthakrishnan Vaidyanathan, Product Manager, ManageEngine said, “People working from home and accessing corporate data from unsecured networks posed a major challenge for the businesses in terms of managing the access from those remote devices. Hence, it has become crucial for the IT administrators to ensure that all the mobile devices get updated and patched regularly, and data on those devices remain secure and protected.”  

Secure mobile workforce with EMM 

Enterprise mobility management (EMM) solutions and practices, however, have helped them to securely manage those devices and prevent any unauthorized access to business applications and business data on those mobile devices.  

EMM encompasses a range of solutions which can be broadly segregated into three categories:  

Mobile device management (MDM) 

MDM gives organizations the ability to remotely control, encrypt, and enforce policies on mobile devices. It can be used to wipe all apps and data from the lost or stolen devices. 

Mobile application management (MAM) 

MAM gives organizations the ability to manage mobile applications, including deploying and updating them, applying security policies.  

Mobile information management (MIM) 

MIM gives organizations the ability to manage and secure the sensitive, and business-critical data on mobile devices.  

EMM solutions encapsulate various aspects of enterprise mobility management starting from managing mobile devices and applications, to managing content, and security part of it as well. The EMM needs also may vary from business to business, depending on specific business needs.  Hence, they need to decide which of these elements or areas deserve better attention. 

Secure endpoints: Is UEM a smarter choice? 

Many businesses today feel that EMM solutions are not enough when it comes to endpoint management. For example, mobile endpoints and IoT endpoints are completely different and need different forms of security and management altogether.  

Unified endpoint management (UEM) takes a more holistic and cohesive approach to the endpoint management issue, by helping businesses manage the security, compliance, productivity, and resource usage of all their endpoints, irrespective of the device type (laptops, tablets, mobiles, wearables, IoT-enabled devices). It supports all major OS types as well. UEM, used in combination with cognitive insights and analytics can deliver unprecedented endpoint management capabilities to IT admins. 

Many UEM solutions offer users automated enrollment, pre-configuration, and retirement for the devices and personalization and dynamic policy configuration across virtual and physical endpoints as well- which make it a more viable option for endpoint management.  

Apart from the simplifying device management for the IT admins, UEM makes it easy for the employees to access any content from anywhere, anytime and use any device of their choice to get their work done.