It was revealed in a recent Mobility Strategy survey that of the large majority (88%) of respondents who indicated their organisation does have a mobility strategy in place to address top mobile priorities, 36% said theirs is a moderately developed mobile strategy and a third of respondents said it is a minimally developed mobile strategy.
"Corporate IT departments need to embark on their enterprise mobility lifecycle by keeping the following key steps in mind; plan the infrastructure; device management, security, people, app strategy and support," "says Paulo Ferreira, Director of Enterprise Mobility at Samsung South Africa, commenting on the results of the ITWeb/Samsung 2016 Mobile Strategy survey, which ran online from 4 January to 25 January this year.
Elaborating on this Ferreira's key point of planning the infrastructure he says that it is essential to plan which new product categories fall within the mantra of enterprise mobility and which of those are supported, as well as which mobile platforms to endorse and support.
"With regards to device management it must be decided what existing tools can be leveraged to manage new devices, or are new tools required?"
Ferreira also believes that to ensure key points are in place for an organisation to adopt the best developed mobile strategy a distinction must be made between private and corporate information on the device and leveraging of containerisation technologies to create this data separation layer on the device.
"Segmenting users by organisational hierarchy, function/role as well as applying policies to accommodate the various audiences should also be included in a mobile strategy," he advises.
Which business apps need to be mobilised is also a key point to bear in mind, as well as exploring Shadow IT as an option of support.
Ferreira closes comment on this point by stating multiple business stakeholders need to be involved in this lifecycle, e.g. HR, compliance, legal, IT, etc and it's critical to measure success of these projects by involving the employees and garnering feedback.
BYOD gets thumbs up
It's not surprising that a combined percentage of 85% of respondents indicated that their enterprise allows employees to make use their own device for work-related functions, only a very small percentage (14%) do not.
"Corporates have recognised that allowing employees to use their personal devices to access company resources can reduce costs and increase employee productivity, effectiveness and job satisfaction. Typically when the strategy is misaligned with the business or not implemented properly it can lead to ineffective data security posing a risk of this data being leaked," Ferreira says.
According to Ferreira user privacy and control can also suffer but with the right strategy, tools and implementation thereof, these risks and challenges are circumvented.
Over half of the respondents (63%) cited that their organisation needs to support as many as a 1 000 mobile devices.
When asked if an organisation's mobility strategy should be adopted to suit the number of devices they need to support, Ferreira states that all the points mentioned previously in this article should take top priority and not the number of devices.
"The only caveat here is for SOHO/SMBs," he says, "these organisations can be more prescriptive in their OEM and platform choices and thus benefit from cheaper solutions which are platform-specific and don't have the inherent enterprise-grade management requirements."
Smartphones and tablets emerged as the most popular devices that need to be supported by an organisation.
"It's accepted that smartphones and tablets will be supported categories in the enterprise. One area of consideration is determining which employees in the organisation require a mix of devices and which can get by using only one category of device. In terms of the newer emerging categories, it's important that organisations assess wearables being paired with smartphones and the impact this has on security and management," Ferreira comments.
He points out that by including these categories in strategies, it will enable customers to guide employees on what's approved for corporate use so that this can be managed before it becomes a challenge. Customers should also monitor if any non-approved platforms are being used to access corporate data and apps.
According to Ferreira the need for organisations to support more devices will grow within the next 12 months.
"This is not only because of the growth of the corporate user segment (prosumer) but also because on average more devices will be used per user in the future. At present research shows that the average business user globally is using three connected devices and this number will grow to six by 2020," Ferreira concludes.
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