Is Your Mobility Management Vendor Behind the Times?

By Scalefusion Guest Blogger

As businesses realize the need for the shift from traditional office spaces to remote work, enterprises are focusing on mobility management strategies.

Each passing day brings new technological trends. Enterprise mobility is one trend that has gained traction, fueled further recently by the Covid-19 crisis. With many businesses pushed to a remote working environment, enterprises have been seeking mobility management solutions to enable flexibility and increased productivity among their employees.

With the majority of businesses around the globe adopting enterprise mobility, there has been a surge in partnership with mobility management solutions or managed service providers (MSPs) offering such services. With enterprises putting their trust in MSPs to provide competitive mobility management solutions, it’s critical for MSPs to offer solutions with the most up-to-date features.

What Is Enterprise Mobility Management?

Enterprise mobility describes an environment in which organizations enable their employees to work from anywhere, with networking and collaboration options that permit corporate data access on personal- or company-owned devices.  As businesses realize the need for the shift from traditional office spaces to remote work, enterprises are focusing on mobility management strategies. But what does enterprise mobility management even mean?

When enterprises chalk out a process of securing the organization’s corporate data and devices with a broad suite of services that makes them safe for use even beyond the office perimeter, it is called enterprise mobility management. EMM requires several features, depending on the nature of the business. These can include the ability to limit applications, restrict access to malicious websites and secure corporate email access, as well as data loss prevention policies, device location tracking, faster networking and instant communication capabilities. Partnering with a comprehensive mobility management solution is the best way to simplify your business’s complex mobility needs.

Why Choosing the Right Mobility Management Vendor Is Crucial for MSPs

MSPs deliver services such as networking, infrastructure, communications and security. They also offer mobile device management (MDM) and EMM solutions. With the surge in the adoption of EMM solutions, the legacy method of mobility management falls short of providing satisfactory results.

EMM solutions are constantly evolving with the addition of newer features to support growing enterprise mobility requirements. Hence, MSPs must analyze and choose the right mobility management vendor and identify outdated ones.

How to Know if Your Mobility Management Vendor Is Outdated

Outdated IT solutions create a business liability and are incapable of addressing the latest system vulnerabilities. Without an efficient and up-to-date mobility management solution, businesses are prone to dysfunctional workflows and decreased output.

You can identify obsolete EMM solutions by considering the following points. Does your EMM vendor:

Mobility management is one of enterprises’ major concerns, so offering exceptional customer and product support is critical for EMM vendors. Agile support teams that help enterprises and IT teams resolve technical queries on the go are crucial for smooth mobility management. However, several EMM vendors charge for technical assistance, which leads to inflated solution pricing. It is crucial to determine whether your EMM vendors offer free lifetime support, to prevent being caught up in additional hidden charges.

EMM vendors that support a limited range of devices or operating systems tend to restrict an enterprise’s ability to effectively mobilize itself. To work effectively for businesses across multiple industries and use cases, EMM solutions must support a broad range of operating systems–such as Android, iOS, macOS andWindows10—and the latest devices–including smartphones, tablets, laptops, mPOS, rugged devices and digital signage.

Coherent remote support lies at the center of every IT admin’s routine responsibilities. With enterprise mobility driving employees to remote work destinations, resolving device errors instantly is one of the prime requirements of every business. Does your EMM solution provide features for establishing a smooth remote connection between remote employees and IT admins in events of device errors? Moreover, what features does your EMM extend to help in faster device issue resolution?

The latest EMM solutions offer a variety of remote support possibilities, such as remote cast and control, for IT admins or organizations to address device issues in real time. With this, IT admins can remotely take control of an employee’s device screen and virtually resolve the error, preventing extended device downtime.  Click on Page 2 to continue reading…

In addition to making remote working possible and safeguarding corporate data and devices, one of the prime purposes of EMM solutions is to reduce redundant manual efforts and reduce the load on IT teams.

Your EMM solution should have a comprehensive set of features designed to that leverage automation to ease the security, operational and management load of IT admins. Legacy mobility management tools offer a restricted set of features that may simplify tasks but don’t create a transitional change in operational efficiency. Opting for the latest EMM solutions that provide extensive features is ideal.

All EMM solutions have a basic set of features designed to make it easier to secure and manage devices and data. However, the latest EMM solutions offer a competitive edge with additional features such as device reports and inventory analytics.

If your EMM solution provides only the primary set of features—including secure browsing and  pass code protection–then it may be time to opt for something that makes your mobility management more competitive.

What is corporate data security if it does not safeguard business emails on employees’ personal devices? Before opting for an EMM solution, it is critical to evaluate the email security configurations and policies that the solution offers.

The latest EMM solutions help enterprises stay ahead of the game with policies such as conditional email access, which helps restrict corporate email access to employees on unmanaged devices.

Enterprise mobility is not restricted to smartphones, tablets and laptops. It also encompasses several other devices, including mPOS, digital signage and rugged devices, based on diverse industry usage.

Realizing this, modern-day EMM solutions offer kiosk lockdown features that enable IT administrators to lock devices in a single or multi-app mode. In this way, they can limit users to accessing only applications designated for them.

Kiosk lockdown has applications in several use cases, including digital signage, which plays a big role in the retail industry; devices used by students in K-12 schools and universities; and devices used in logistics and delivery.

Conclusion

With so many enterprises operating in a remote environment, organizations rely heavily on their employees’ personal devices to ensure business continuity and flexible work environments, regardless of location. It is therefore critical to identify and steer clear of outdated EMM solutions.

Modern EMM solutions such as Scalefusion offer an extensive set of features that cater not only to enterprises’ needs but also the user experience. Scalefusion makes it easy for enterprises to mobilize themselves with cutting-edge features such as kiosk mode to lock devices in single or multi-app modes, conditional email access for corporate email security, remote cast  and control for easy troubleshooting, deep-dive analytics for an inventory-wide overview, reports on device vitals, and much more for Android, iOS, macOS and Windows devices.

 This guest blog is part of a Channel Futures sponsorship.