Predictions For 2017-18

The popularity of enterprise mobility can be easily recognized from the fact that about 71% of the organizations consider mobility as their number one priority. According to an estimate by Nasscom, the global market for enterprise mobility is approximately valued at $140 billion annually by the year 2020. It is not a surprise at all to see this encouraging adoption of enterprise mobility services by companies irrespective of scale or size, considering that it can save almost 240 hours per employee.

But, it is also important to note that this is an emerging technology with the space being extremely fluid. Every other day, new paradigm seems to be emerging. Check out these top five trends in enterprise mobility for 2017 to ensure that you are on the right track with your mobility integration programme.

1.     Artificial Intelligence features likely to go mainstream

You must be aware that AI or Artificial Intelligence technology is being widely used in the field of computing. This has led to a growing number of enterprise apps becoming “smart” now. Some of the examples are Cortana, Google Now and Siri. The launch of many smart apps like these enables the users to regulate the security, heating and lighting systems.

An increasing number of enterprises have started relying more on technology due to the fast adoption of Artificial Intelligence. At the same time, security concerns have risen as compared to earlier times. In case, there is a security failure, it can be a threat to the whole enterprise. So, it is the responsibility of an enterprise to assure complete security.

2.     Rapid application of cloud technology

Cloud services now have become extremely mature. These services are easily available and are both reliable and can be procured at affordable prices. The high probability of the big data has further increased the migration of these enterprise services to cloud,

Though the popularity of the cloud computing is beyond doubt, there is a big challenge in the form of security. Many enterprises are trying to control this concern by opting for on-premise mission critical applications or apps and hybrid solutions on the cloud.

3.     Bring-Your-Own-Devices has gone being more than just a trend

BYOD or Bring-Your-Own-Devices culture is very common these days in the corporate world. It offers benefits like high efficiency and tremendous productivity along with increased use of mobility. All these have made BYOD not just a trend but much more. It is graduating into becoming a usual norm in several enterprises. However, there are some challenges too. The devices brought by the executives are hardly equipped with the security features that are mandatory for being used inside the premises of an enterprise.

So, the IT team of an enterprise is under a lot of pressure to ensure the security of all those BYOD devices, which are being used inside the corporate network. MDM or mobile device management solutions are deployed to minimize the possible pain points, which can come in the way of productivity, as well as the work fluidity that gets executed on those devices.

4.     Increase of companion apps

Many organizations are literally struggling to develop certain enterprise apps that will be beneficial for their customers as well as for internal functions. Instead of generic apps that were a trend earlier, the focus now is more on companion apps. These are apps that intend to make a certain function or task easy instead of cloning all the features of a particular desktop app.

5.     Increase of Citizen Developers

Since the enterprise apps are highly in demand, they have led to the popularity and the rise of no-code, low-code and cross-platform development environments that provide user-friendly options like drag and drop and speed up the timeline of the app development to a great extent.

Whether it’s a huge business establishment or a small-scale venture, enterprise mobility revolutionizes processes and operations across industry verticals. With on-the-go operations heading towards exponential growth, companies are increasingly embracing and adopting mobility solutions.

Irrespective of the roles they play in their workplaces, employees have the opportunity to enjoy unsurpassed convenience.

Flexible work schedules and operations inevitably translate into high business revenues and unparalleled development. Nearly every enterprise or company is opting for mobility solutions. Let’s turn to some stats, so that you get a complete lowdown on the topic.

Stats alert

Enterprise mobility seems to be the need of the hour. Irrespective of the nature of businesses or its location, mobility solutions can work wonders for employees. If reports published in ‘Forrsights Networks And Telecommunications Survey’ are to be followed, nearly 64% of companies in North America and Europe consider mobility amongst their top priorities.

None other than employees determine your venture’s performance and revenues. Therefore, it’s highly essential to ensure optimum convenience and flexibility for them. With the widespread use of Smartphones, tablets along with the increasing importance of BYOD trends, mobility solutions are emerging as crucial necessities for every business today.

With the capability and power to transform numerous operations across departments, mobility plays a pivotal role while onboarding employees. Let’s take a deeper look into the situation.

Mobility and unified employee platforms

It’s quite tough to onboard a new workforce and speed up their operations. Especially, if you have mobile employees offering remote support, things become tougher than ever. There’s nothing like face-to-face interactions and effective communications.

However, when it’s your startup, and you are just in the initial stages, unified employee platforms might just turn out to be the right solutions.

That brings us to a crucial point in the discussion. So, what it is it that makes unified mobility platforms the best option while onboarding employees. Here are some aspects to consider:

How does this help?

Unified mobility platforms aim at creating unique experiences for employees. They get a complete picture of your company motto, values, principles, and objectives. These little bits of information play an important role when it comes to understanding crucial business processes and enterprise functioning.

New employees also have the opportunity to know their colleagues along with the tasks performed by them. It’s here that we need to know the most effective ways of doing that.

Tips for successful onboarding

Adopt the best practices that you truly believe in. Plan carefully, get your hands on a high-powered video camera and create an exceptionally engaging script. With these things in place, you can move on to the following steps:

• Welcome videos: Create welcome videos for each of your employees. Let them know about their respective roles and how they can contribute to your business.
• Short training videos: With the incredible capability to engage viewers, videos can turn out to be the best tools for onboarding new workers and employees. Create short training videos thus imparting targeted and effective training to employees.

Parting thoughts

You will have to embrace unified mobility solutions to achieve successful onboarding of employees. That will be the key to achieving unmatched business growth.

A number of Indian and global MNCs have, since a very long time, upgraded to the concept of BYOD i.e. Bring Your Own Device. Each professional, thus, brings their own device to work and accesses wireless and mobile networks through the company platform. This was initially done to aid the workers and support them with their network needs. Now, it also doubles up as a surveillance system to detect the calls/SMS that could be possibly causing internal fraud.

Enterprise mobility management is a tool that allows the owners to keep track of the incoming and outgoing calls and SMS and emails that directly affect the company’s functioning. This process or method of internalizing networks also provides support in cases of data fraud or when the device is lost. Data that is susceptible to fraud has higher chances of being accessed through various unfair means.

Enterprise mobility management looks after this very situation. All the company data on a worker’s device is protected through passwords and easily erased in case a device is misplaced. This reduces the chance of misuse and apotential threat to the company’s database is also diminished.

Key factors for successful implementation of Enterprise mobility management

Within the broad spectrum of Enterprise mobility management, there come three important yet very common issues that need instant requital. These points of consideration also enlist in detail the significant aspects of Enterprise mobility management.

• Mobile security

In this age of regular mobile habit, handset safety is a major factor to be addressed. Simply because it is easier to access, we tend to store a range of data and recordings that are needed in our workplaces in our phones. This makes mobile security even more significant an issue.

Under the Enterprise mobility management tool, users can easily lock data and other relevant documents on their handsets and prevent any mistreatment on illegal admittance. Furthermore, the set passwords can be brought into use by the administrators and through complete blocking or data wipe out, the records can be protected.

• Mobile device management

The applications on a personnel’s mobile device need a constant upgrade for the device to function smoothly. Through the enterprise mobility management tool, professionals working on the system make constant efforts towards this and ensure that the handset is managed rightly. This also keeps the data on a mobile handset perfectly synced with the company’s database.

Nowadays, cloud storage have increased that allow users to directly save edits to the cloud storage and rule out chances of data infringement or loss or beyond deadline submissions. Along with this, mobile device management has resulted in better productivity and increased security. Better productivity is dependent on increased security as lesser fear of loss of data induces better commitment towards work.

• Mobile application management

The applications on a user’s mobile device need correct management for smooth performance of the device. The final output of a person depends on upon the clarity with which the devices around him/her work. Mobility management makes sure that these minor subjects are taken care of, and specific taskforce is delegated towards this certain job.

Enterprise mobility is fast gaining recognition amongst new start-ups as well. This is one aspect of technological advancement that is rapidly seeing growth and popularity.

With the ever-growing popularity of on-the-go operations, businesses are warming up to the concept of enterprise mobility. By helping companies develop a dedicated mobile workforce, enterprise mobility takes their growth objectives forward. Especially, the rapid proliferation of mobile devices adds more power to this concept. Skilled and efficient employees are rendering remote support, thus keeping your bottom lines intact.

However, it’s not always that good or beneficial. In addition to the numerous advantages, enterprise mobility has its fair share of drawbacks too. While unsurpassed productivity remains at the top of its benefits, high development costs happen to be a serious roadblock.

On that note, let’s get down to discussing the crucial benefits and drawbacks associated with enterprise mobility.

Benefits of the concept

Statistical Insights will present a crystal clear picture of the issue. According to market stats, mobile applications increase and improve employee productivity by 36% and 40%. A whopping 70% of enterprises have invested in mobile workforce, with the other 20% gearing up for it.

So, what do these stats suggest?

Productivity is highly critical to the success of your dream venture, and enterprise mobility aims to take it to unmatched heights. With highly productive employees working for your business, huge ROIs won’t be a distant dream.

1.     Promoting BYOD trends

BYOD trends can help your employees perform better. The liberty to work on their devices leads to workflow personalization. Your employees deliver amazing performances, as they have the opportunity to use their Smartphones at work. Enterprise mobility also grants the liberty to work from home or other locations, which further increases employee convenience.

2.     Work-life balance

The ever-increasing market competition is getting the better of your employees each day. Multiple assignments and commitments are making life tedious and tough for them. With enterprise mobility, they can now work according to their comfortable schedules.

With the availability of some of the highly functional enterprise mobility tools and solutions, workers are finding it quite easy to strike the perfect balance between work and life.

3.     Unmatched productivity

Irrespective of the nature of operations, productivity happens to be the prime requisite for every business organization. With a whopping 45% of mobile device usage being done during travels and transits, you can be sure of achieving your productivity goals within the shortest span.

Looking at the challenges

In spite of these amazing benefits, enterprise mobility is not without a fair share of hassles. Some of the critical challenges include:

1.          High development costs

The initial cost of developing enterprise apps is quite high. Perhaps, this is one of the prime reasons that 80% of enterprises delay their mobility plans and strategies.

2.          Browser-based apps or native applications

Most of the times, both the developers and business owners are in a fix while deciding the platform. Crucial considerations of the pros and cons will help them make the right decision.

3.          Security

With Cloud storage and operations coming into the picture, device security turns out to be a critical challenge. While adopting mobility, enterprises must devise robust plans for increased device security.

Parting thoughts

Enterprise mobility is significant and crucial for every business organization today. In spite of the drawbacks, you simply can’t ignore the numerous benefits it brings to your dream venture.

Gone are the days when you had to deal with space crunches in your workplace. Solitary cubicles and working in silos was what prevented productivity to go beyond the traditional benchmarks. With enterprise mobility gaining grounds across the business landscape, things are undoubtedly changing for the better.

Most of the working professionals today, choose to operate using their personal devices. According to reliable survey reports, a whopping 66% of individuals using Smartphones and 46% using tablets, opt for their respective devices when it comes to performing crucial business tasks.

Such changing work behavior has also popularized BYOD and ‘anywhere-anytime’ working trends, thus ensuring and enhancing convenience for both organizations and employees. Present-day organizations are increasingly adopting BYOD trends and leveraging devices, thus adding to enterprise productivity.

However, with this convenience comes the critical question of data security. Let’s see how data security has fared against this evolving trend of enterprise mobility.

Enterprise mobility and data security

Mobile workforce and enterprise mobility are heading towards unprecedented growth and success. If market predictions are anything to go by, enterprise mobility market will touch the 500-billion mark by 2020 on a global level. With this ever-increasing popularity and widespread adoption of enterprise mobility, data security is emerging as a crucial necessity.

CTOs (Chief Technology Officers) and entrepreneurs are trying their best to safeguard crucial business data from massive security breaches. Since confidential enterprise data is the key to enterprise functioning, agility, and productivity, entrepreneurs are putting their best efforts to reduce security vulnerabilities.

On that note, it’s high time for us to uncover the major data security breaches and issues in this context.

Identifying the issues

Organizations embracing the idea of mobility are mostly concerned about the following issues:

• Device encryption
• Data leakage
• Data breach

Finding the appropriate and targeted approach will be highly necessary to mitigate such data security issues. Here are some of the approaches worth considering.

1.      Choosing MM solutions judiciously

While looking for enterprise mobility solutions, every organization must give importance to exclusive features such as over-the-air hardware, remote device operation, and network inventory. The mobility management suite must have provisions for proper device support and operating systems.

Opting for Enterprise Mobility Management Solutions with broad and extended coverage will turn out to be the best option. That will also fetch you a gamut of options while choosing devices.

2.      Threat protection systems with data encryption

Highly secure EMM solutions will help your IT department gain complete control over mobile devices and applications. Your IT team must have central governance over mobile threat issues as well as the power to blacklist malicious apps.

Along with data encryption and multiple authentications, EMM solutions will ensure robust security for enterprise data.

Parting thoughts

With the introduction and widespread use of OS such as Android 5.5 Lollipop and iOS 9, data security has reached entirely new heights. Companies are increasingly adopting BYOD and remote working thanks to the improved security features that helps them to maintain data integrity and confidentiality while boosting employee productivity at the same time.

What steps would you be taking to maintain data security under the changing enterprise mobility situations? Do write in to us and let us know.