Is IT Prepared for the Changes in Enterprise Mobility?

SOURCE: AgreeYa Solutions

Mobile devices are quickly becoming the primary devices among enterprises. Their great user experience, increased computing capabilities, explosion of apps, and always-on connectivity combined with agility, make them ideal replacements for PCs. Mobility these days, is not just a tool enabling employees access to email and a handful of corporate applications, but rather a tool to improve employee productivity and ease of working by enabling them with real-time connectivity to customers, partners, suppliers and workers.

As more and more employees continue to use their personal devices for accessing corporate data, IT departments are finding it difficult to keep corporate data secure. IT departments need to adopt new management tools and security strategies to maintain corporate data secure and at the same time provide user flexibility to allow the use of personal devices within a corporate network.

BYOD (Bring Your Own Device)

Unfortunately, allowing employees to use their personal devices for corporate communication and to access corporate data BYOD is getting difficult for IT departments to manage. As hundreds of new devices and thousands of new mobile applications launch every month,IT often cannot scan, manage or control this rapid growth.

With BYOD, IT departments are coming up with new innovative solutions which can be a bit restrictive, but are nonetheless acceptable by employees.

CYOD (Choose Your Own Device):

This allows organizations to publish a list of approved devices employees can buy. New devices are continuously added to these lists as new devices are launched into the market. It helps the IT team to revise and apply polices to the devices more effectively.

CYOD is a win-win situation both for enterprises and employees to achieve basic enterprise security. In this situation, IT needs fewer devices and OS, and employees receive the flexibility to choose a device of their preference from a given pool.

COPE (Corporate Owned Personally Enabled):

In COPE, the device is owned by the company, but the device has two separate purposes: one for work which is often under a tight security policy and another is free for employee personal use. The IT department typically has very few devices and employees can choose any one of them, but the device is always corporate-owned.

COPE is not as flexible as CYOD but more flexible than the COBO policy, where employees can only use corporate owned devices and cannot perform any personal work.

Enterprise mobility is a reality that organizations can no longer avoid, so they will need to identify their needs and have to choose an enterprise mobility strategy accordingly.

About AgreeYa Solutions: AgreeYa is a global provider of software, solutions, and services focused on deploying business-driven, technology-enabled solutions that create next-generation competitive advantages for customers. Headquartered in Folsom, Calif., AgreeYa employs more than 1,300 professionals across its 15 offices in eight countries. Over the last 16 years, AgreeYa has worked with 200+ organizations ranging from Fortune 100 firms to small and large businesses across industries. AgreeYa’s software portfolio includes SocialXtend (intranet and enterprise social collaboration), VDIXtend (desktop-on-cloud), Onvelop (unified enterprise collaboration and communication suite for mobile), Edvelop (single window collaboration and communication solution on mobile for 21^st century learning), Cogent (comprehensive end-to-end case management solution for collections agencies and law firms) and QuickApps (award winning suite of SharePoint web parts and pre-built templates). As part of its solutions and services offerings, AgreeYa provides portal, content management, and collaboration on SharePoint, cloud and infrastructure, enterprise mobility, business intelligence and big data analytics, product engineering, application development and management, independent software testing, and staffing (IT and risk/compliance) solutions. For more information, visit www.agreeya.com.