Order from Chaos: Five Steps for Reining in Runaway Mobility

Mobile computing has blazed through many organizations as a powerful grass-roots movement, often unguided by IT’s hand. The big-bang nature of mobility’s genesis made it tough for IT leaders to integrate the many facets of enterprise mobility effectively.

The result has been years of trying to cobble together fragmented solutions into something that would support a mobile worker. But integration gaps have often caused mobility initiatives to fall short. And these experiences have shown that multiple-vendor strategies can be costly, time consuming and sometimes risk-prone.

However, options for IT to get its arms around mobility are maturing, both in best practices and comprehensive tools that alleviate the integration headaches. Here are some prudent measures IT leaders can take:

1.  Regularly survey users about their mobility wants, needs, and concerns – a general IT best practice.

2.  Create a mobile device ownership model and associated policy decisions. If the company owns a device used by an employee, can that employee load their own public apps on the devices, for example?

3.  Set usage and security policies at the device, application and network levels. Get employees to sign off on the policies.

4.  Evaluate tools to automate the enforcement of those policies. Specifically, consider a unified mobility platform, like a workspace delivery solution, that addresses universal mobile data access and mobile app distribution, security, and management across any type of mobile device and any type of network an employee might be using. That means supporting Windows, web, SaaS and mobile apps everywhere.

5.  Decide where to host your mobile workspace services and deploy: Choices include on-premises servers, virtualized software servers, cloud services, or a mix. Make sure your mobility solution supports any choice you make and gives you the ability to change your mind in the future.

An integrated workspace delivery solution addresses the data access, productivity, and security gaps common to multi-vendor approaches. Several organizations, for example, have turned to Citrix Workspace Suite as their platform. The suite integrates desktop and application virtualization for securely delivering Windows apps to mobile users; enterprise mobility management; secure enterprise data access, synchronization, and sharing; a secure access gateway, and other capabilities. For example: 

• Using Citrix Workspace Suite, a healthcare provider embraced bring-your-own-device (BYOD) for employee satisfaction and improved patient care while remaining strictly compliant with HIPAA regulations for patient privacy. Clinicians now have secure self-service access to clinical apps of all types, data and personalized desktops from any device.
• A natural gas producer used Citrix Workspace Suite to embrace BYOD for 8,500 employees. Their major requirement? That the solution’s security capabilities matched or exceeded BlackBerry’s. Today, company employees can access corporate apps and data on tablets, including high-end geographical information systems, and they work more efficiently in the field.

These are just a couple examples of how organizations are benefiting from the integration and comprehensiveness of an integrated mobility platform. These platforms are freeing organizations to move forward with their strategic mobility programs without the compromises and tradeoff they once had to face.