Jul 8, 2017
Changing Mobility Landscape and How to use it to your advantage
“We do not live in a Mobile First World. We live in a Mobile-Only world.”
This quote by Larry Page clearly demonstrates a fundamental change businesses are experiencing right now.
People from the 90s and before have seen this change happening right in front of their eyes. They have been witnesses to the decrease in cost of communication, they have been witnesses to the rapid growth of mobile devices catalyzed by their decrease in prices, they have been witnesses to this proliferation of cost-effective connectivity through 2G, 3G and now 4G networks.
Indeed, they can confirm the fact that enterprise IT is on the brink of a revolution. Work is moving beyond our traditional brick and mortar offices.
This has only been made possible by this rapid proliferation of devices: smartphones, tablets, and other devices.
“People do not put their phone down and look for their desktop to do something. They use their Mobile Phones.”
— Paul Cousineau, Director, Amazon
Business heads do realize the opportunities associated with this growth but at the same time, every change brings with it cost, governance and security issues among many others which they have to consider.
Increased Adoption
According to a study by Industry Insight 2017, A Global Perspective, 88% of the IT executives conveyed that Mobility is a priority for their organization.
Traditional mode of working. where organizations had desktops installed on each table where workers used to come and leave at a fixed time, are slowly fading away.
The demand for new models of work are not driven by the top leadership. Instead it is the employees that are demanding increased mobility. Be it on a plane wi-fi 30,000ft above the ground or in a conference room or in a coffee shop, they expect to be able to access key applications and stay productive.
Supporting this is the pace at which cloud and the applications on it are growing in number and maturity. They now enable anywhere, anytime access to key enterprise resources like CRM, Productivity Apps, Line of Business Apps etc.
Gartner estimates that the average enterprise has deployed between 8 and 15 mobile applications.
The traditional workplaces are now being transformed to digital workplaces thereby making resources easily accessible to the employees thereby boosting their engagement and productivity.
This has directly influenced business outcomes by enabling organizations to better engage with the customers over different touch points and improving business processes by promoting collaboration thereby creating business opportunities.
Challenges to Mobility Adoption
Enterprise Mobility has been a vital point for most organizations. While the business leaders are convinced about its benefits, there are still some concerns which they need to consider:
Security: This is, right now, the major concern facing business and IT heads in an organization. CIOs are dealing with business critical information, the loss of which could lead to serious repercussions to the company.
With the growth of BYOD, employees install other applications on mobile phones. This can release the critical corporate information from its safety net and make it prone to security and compliance concerns.
Governance: Organizations nowadays have multitude of workers carrying a diverse range of device right from the latest Iphone to the oldest android. Bringing every device under the ambit becomes a huge challenge for not only the organizations but also the solutions provider.
Microsoft’s Story
A special challenge calls for a special solution. And that is where I feel Microsoft is doing a great job. Its EMS is the most comprehensive and complete which would enable organisations to embrace change and mobility.
The perimeter of security isn’t restricted to the four walls of the enterprise. Nowadays, with the growth of mobility, IT managers expect that perimeter to be around a single identity
Microsoft’s identity driven security helps organizations keep pace with security challenges and helps the employees stay productive at all times.
How does it achieve that?
Microsoft EMS is a comprehensive and flexible solution which can enable you to manage and protect not only your data, but also your devices, apps and users which are using that data be it on-premises or on cloud.
This enables the IT managers to ensure the security of data by managing who can use which type of data on which device.
It is a cloud-first, mobile-first world and who can understand it better than a company who is building a whole ecosystem around it.
But is it only about Windows?
If you are also one of those who feel that Microsoft is only about Windows and Office, then this might turn out to be an eye-opener for you.
This image shows the number and diversity of devices managed through the EMS portal of one single organisation. Turns out we are talking about more than 40K devices. Such is the complexity of challenge, this company has set itself out to tackle.
Conclusion
IT landscape is facing a sea shift, and the companies who can not only embrace but lead the change are bound to emerge as industry leaders. Time travel 50 years back and the chances that a Fortune 500 company would become irrelevant would be very low. In the current scenario, examples of Kodak and Xerox clearly demonstrate that change is the only constant and organizations have to embrace it to stay relevant.
In the current scenario, IT managers have to be empowering while at the same time protecting corporate assets in order to support and lead the digital transformations that organisations are going through right now.
What are your views on it? I look forward to interacting with you.
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