Top 10 Elements that are Reshaping Enterprise Mobility in 2019

Posted by Sonali Datta on October 16th, 2019

The growing influx of mobile phones has reshaped the modern workforce and employee expectations from companies. Enterprise mobility along with IT consumerization has influenced businesses across the globe to embrace digital transformation and other technological advancements. Together they have changed the way we work today – anywhere, anytime and from any device. As mobility rose so did the necessity to manage mobile devices and user interaction with a well-laid and standardized enterprise mobility strategy. Delve deep into the blog to explore the current Enterprise Mobility trends that the business leaders should evaluate to take the right decision at the right time.

The key factors that are shaping and influencing enterprise mobility for our business:

1.      Increased BYOD Adoption

Companies are increasingly embracing BYOD as a policy due to its proven advantages in enhancing employee flexibility, productivity, and work efficiency. The BYOD culture has risen from being just a trend to a regular workplace standard and has gained popularity for factors like user yield, minimal infrastructure investment, and increased penetration of a variety of mobile devices.

To be BYOD ready, your organization will have to devise and implement concrete BYOD policy, BYOD management strategy, and tackle device and network security issues with a robust mobile device management solution.

2.      IoT Boom

As IoT devices such as connected wearables are preferred for their functionality, utility, real-time behavior, easy monitoring, resilience, and reactivity, companies are exploring ways to introduce them in workplace for enhanced mobility. Clubbed with declining technology cost, the wide availability of broadband internet, and an increased number of devices supporting Wi-Fi, a large set of employees will start using IoT devices for work too.

The future of the enterprise mobility program will depend on how IoT devices are used to collect, store, and access critical data.

Companies will have to treat IoT penetration in a corporate setup with utmost urgency and look for unified endpoint management solutions that will support multiple devices and monitor them over the same network.

3.      Location-based Business Apps

Location-based business apps will liberate employees from the limitations of desktops and laptops. These GPS enabled apps will be created for the business purpose to support employees working at different locations or while traveling. These apps will have the following features:

·         Fast load times, irrespective of network connectivity

·         Automatic non-intrusive updates

·         Support different platforms and OS

·         Employee tracking and schedules

4.     Cloud Computing Gains Prominence

Increased number of endpoints mean an explosion of data, which will test an organization’s storage infrastructure. Companies are gradually moving to secured cloud computing practices to address memory and other infrastructure limitations. Cloud-based services are more sophisticated, easily available, reliable, and affordable.

Security concerns will still remain when enterprises resort to cloud-based services and to deal with the security issues most companies host on-premise mission-critical applications and host the other applications on the cloud.

5.     Multi-platform EMM

The ubiquity of enterprise devices like desktops, printers, rugged devices, laptops, tablets, smartphones, wearables and so on will make the line between Enterprise Mobility Management and Unified Endpoint Management fade to make EMM vendors possess UEM capabilities. This simply means that EMM vendors will be expected to offer end-to-end device management solutions like deploying, managing, securing, monitoring, controlling, streamlining and integrating all devices with existing business platforms like IT Service Management, Enterprise Communications and other tools as well. All this while maintaining faultless user experience, corporate data security and overall performance.

6.     AI-driven Enterprise IT

Artificial Intelligence has now gained a strong foothold in a variety of industries for improved productivity and performance. AI and chatbots will see an increased application in enterprise mobility to automate mundane tasks like device registration, customer interaction, employee communication, device onboarding, pushing security updates, application management, real-time notifications, etc. An enterprise mobility strategy with AI capability will witness fewer human errors and faster operational workflows driving better and faster decision-making and issue resolution. Enterprise mobility solutions will turn to AI to combat ingenious and complex malware.

7.    Mobility Analytics

Enterprise mobility offers unmatched connectivity, accessibility, and efficiency. Data from mobile phones can be used to understand current trends, employee preferences and needs, and their behavior. An overall bird’s view of all your devices from a single dashboard will allow you to stay ahead of any urgent issues like device downtime, access to sensitive data, device health, emergency notifications, device loss, misuse or inactivity.

The demand for mobility analytics will increase for various reasons:

·  Understanding employees’ preferred platforms or the ones that best fit employee needs.

·  Monitoring the real-time flow of blended data and employee behavior can help identify problem areas and security breach.

8.   Consolidation of Device Management Solutions

Apart from mobile device management solutions, vendors are also focusing on aspects like mobile content management (MCM), mobile application management (MAM), mobile identity and access management, and much more. Apart from this, there is a need to support multiple endpoints and a variety of devices. Robust integration with cloud-based services is also needed.

Hence, enterprise mobility is moving towards consolidating business mobility management services to provide a more holistic platform. Brands are thus now scaling up to deliver Enterprise Mobility Management (EMM) and more versatile unified endpoint management (UEM) systems.

9.    Intelligent Apps and Chatbots

Intelligent apps can help boost employee productivity levels by predicting their choices and requirements by leveraging data from their phones, browsers, wearable, browsers etc. For instance, an app could trigger an employee’s work profile on her device, schedules meeting, or book a conference room based on this data.

Chatbots can facilitate simple employee conversations, double up as schedulers, perform repetitive tasks, and even recommend solutions to aid employees in making informed decisions.

10.  Android is Now an Option for Businesses

While companies still prefer iOS when it comes to making a platform choice, but Android is gaining ground as employees bring more Android-based devices for work.

Also, with Google’s launch of Android Enterprise Recommended, Android will see more adoption in times to come.

These ten industry influencers are reshaping the future trends and adoption rate of enterprise mobility and the selection of management services for enterprise mobile devices. The business side of enterprise mobility is changing too fast and EMM service providers are catching up with the ever-increasing pace. Businesses that are aware of the technological advancements have proven to be better decision-makers than the ones who lacked the industry knowledge.

About the author:

Sonali brings over 10 years of practical experience in analysing, exploring and writing for information technology, enterprise software, business strategy, technological innovations, enterprise mobility, digital technologies and business sustainability. With an extensive background of working with global IT and software companies, she maintains a customer-centric, value-driven and problem-solving approach in her write-ups. She is currently working for Scalefusion. Read more of her posts at https://blog.scalefusion.com.