The great amount of penetration by mobile devices has recently increased the need for mobile connectivity at all times and from anywhere. If you are reading this article from your mobile device, you know what we are talking about!

The rapid rise of cloud computing, big data analytics, Internet of Things (IoT) and Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) strategy in organizations caused the need for enterprise mobility. Employees bring their own devices to work and they store a lot of enterprise information on their devices.

For example, employees take notes during meetings in “Evernote” or use Dropbox to share documents with other employees. This is all part of the mobile connectivity growth that people witness in corporate firms.

Most companies are aware of this mobile revolution and they try to cope with the demand for mobility at work. They are working overtime to come up with strategies to effectively handle the security of mobile devices, mobile apps and data for increased productivity at work. So, let's take a look at

• The benefits of enterprise mobility,
• Why you need an enterprise mobile strategy, and
• The steps for formulating a full proof strategy.

The Benefits of Enterprise Mobility

Check out some benefits of enterprise mobility.

• It gives you instant access to official emails, documents, etc. on your mobile device. You also gain the ability to communicate via email from anywhere and at any time.

• It increases the productivity of the work done. This is done through your employees make the optimal use of official travel time to carry out office tasks.

• It allows you to handle more business through better interactions with your customers. This is because the customers connect with your enterprise through their mobile devices.

Why You Need an Enterprise Mobility Strategy

Your business needs to devise a sound enterprise mobility strategy to:

• Maintain the security of sensitive company information on mobile devices and fulfill customer's privacy requirements

• Incorporate mobility into the business processes by using different mobile technologies to create new business opportunities

• Make your organization's existing architecture and infrastructure flexible enough to deal with many devices and apps connected through IoT

• Increase your business productivity by getting your employees connected via mobile devices to back-end systems, and

• Manage the mobile devices, apps and, more importantly, the data

The Steps For Formulating A Sound Mobility Strategy

Listed down are some steps to formulate a sound mobility strategy:

Step 1: Define the Business Goals and Outcomes

Your business needs to understand the outcomes of using mobile devices and the related apps. But, you should not only support particular devices.

You also need to understand the:

• Need to upgrade the existing infrastructure and develop new apps, and
• Need to make the most of the new opportunities created by enterprise mobility.

When you have clearly defined the goals, you can proceed to the next step.

Step 2: Select the Right Approach for Mobile App Development

While you develop your enterprise’s mobile apps, you must ensure you design them to provide a high-quality and user-friendly experience. You also need to consider integrating the app with back-end systems to ensure the app’s security through authorized single sign-on and role-based access. You further have to choose the right approach for mobile app development.

For example, you can develop web apps. These are websites that you can easily view on a laptop and on the small screens of smartphones. Alternatively, you can develop custom native apps for specific platforms like Android, iOS and Windows. Your employees must download these native apps so they can use them.

Step 3: Focus on Continuous Delivery for Apps

You cannot relax after developing and deploying an effective enterprise mobile app. You have to regularly work on the app and provide timely updates. The app users will thus get new features and the app will be better than the earlier versions. You must ensure continuous delivery so they need to keep updating the apps. This also means that you need to expand the compatibility of your app with multiple platforms. This is especially true if you initially developed it only for one or two platforms.

Step 4: Ensure Usage of Secure APIs and End-to-End Security

You need to use new mobile-based services, such as APIs, to ensure you integrate it with the back-end system. You need to do this without having to touch the existing system.

You can use APIs from third-party developers to avoid creating every app on your own. However, you should give the security of the APIs and the overall security prime importance.

Step 5: Define Mobility Decisions & Who'll Make them

You must be clear from the start about who will make the relevant decisions about mobility. Apart from the previous points discussed here, your chosen control team will have to decide about:

• The protection of data outside the company's firewalls,
• The need for data caching, and
• The kind of data must be made available on mobile devices.

We hope that we have helped you formulate a good mobility strategy that keeps the future in mind!  

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Last updated on 14th August 2020