This is a sponsored post by Dimension Data. Find out about the critical gap that exists in enterprise mobility in its Secure Mobility Survey Report.
You have probably read about how businesses should do more to better manage BYOD and the plethora of mobile devices increasingly used to access and store corporate data. One solution often touted as being able to help address this issue would be the use of mobile device management, or MDM.
There are many MDM solutions around today, offering varying degrees of integration with mobile platforms such as Android, and BlackBerry 10, iOS, and Windows Phone. Indeed, some of the more sophisticated solutions will even integrate with Active Directory and IT-centric management products such as Microsoft System Management Server (SMS).
Yet how exactly does an MDM solution help an enterprise better manage mobile devices? To help you form a better picture, we highlight some important capabilities that a good MDM would offer.
IT policies
Like a good system management solution that is widely employed to manage PC desktops and laptops in an enterprise, an MDM solution makes it easy to push out IT policies that are enforced on individual mobile devices. This is usually a prerequisite before access to corporate resources is opened up, and serves as a “single pane of glass” for system administrators and IT managers who may not necessarily be familiar with the intricacies or limitations of each mobile platform.
Policies could range from configurations such as the use of device encryption, robust passwords, and automatic password locking. In some cases, this includes disabling features such as the camera, as well as the ability to easily implement IEEE 802.1x for more secure Wi-Fi authentication.
Increased visibility
While antimalware software to detect and eliminate spyware and malware on smartphones and tablets are still in its infancy, there is greater urgency than ever to defend against such attacks given the increasing number of threats designed to target mobile devices. On this front, a good MDM solution offers greatly increased visibility into the deployed mobile assets.
As it is, enterprises are able to better track various aspects of the mobile devices running on the corporate network. Among others, this may include tracking the volume of data sent and received by smartphones, the system processes that are running, or messages and calls made to blacklisted numbers. These parameters could be flagged to offer an early warning into the presence of malware.
Rapid provisioning
Finally, MDM offers the ability to rapidly provision in-house developed apps, or to keep existing apps updated. By leaving application rollouts to tried-and-tested tools, developers are better able to concentrate instead on value-creation tasks such as creating user-friendly and productivity-enhancing business apps that impact the bottom line.
This is a sponsored post by Dimension Data. Find out about the critical gap that exists in enterprise mobility in its Secure Mobility Survey Report.