The Five Common Mobility Errors

The mobile enterprise is the BYOD enterprise. That may be one reason some organizations have failed to take a comprehensive approach to enabling mobility. A few years ago, when a handful of people started bringing in their smart phones and tablets to work, IT managers responded in an incremental way – perhaps by adding a single MDM (Mobile Device Management) application or tweaking their firewall — as soon as they found out. Many IT pros will tell you that when BYOD began, they did not know for several months that key staff were using their own devices.

That was then. Today, everyone knows people are using their own devices. Even so, at some organizations, mobile management still has not caught up. Here are five mobility mistakes that are made far too often:

1)   Focusing too much on the device. Because BYOD begins with the device, there is a tendency to make that device the center of your attention. Sure, you need to know if some of your corporate users have jailbroken their smartphones, and you must be able to remotely wipe the devices. Your MDM software must be able to do those things. But the device is just one piece of the puzzle. There’s much more to the mobile enterprise.

2)   Neglecting the end user. It’s not so much the hardware device but the person using it that’s most important. Your MDM and MAM (Mobile Application Management) software must give you the ability to grant each user appropriate permission levels for access to applications and data. And when data is allowed to reside on the device, it must be encrypted – because devices can – and will – fall into the wrong hands.

3)   Forgetting about the “legacy” apps. Since your business-critical Windows apps are likely the most prevalent in your enterprise, they cannot be forgotten. Your mobile infrastructure should be integrated with Active Directory, and the Windows applications themselves must perform optimally on your mobile touch-screen clients.

4)   Overlooking the network. You’ve provisioned your pipes and put up a firewall. Your end users are using the corporate data plan on their mobile devices. So you’re done, right? Wrong. To get the most out of your network, you need load balancing, caching and compression, single sign-on, acceleration, encryption and micro-app VPN enablement. Otherwise, your network won’t deliver the responsiveness and reliability that your users need to get their work done in a mobile enterprise.

5)   Implementing non-comprehensive EMM. If you have added mobile management tools incrementally over time, there’s a good chance you are missing a few pieces of the puzzle. And those missing pieces could be costing you in terms of poor return on investment, faulty security and lackluster user experience. Take a look at your complete mobile management picture. They should give you full management control of 1) apps, including mobile, SaaS, web, 2) data with a seamless experience that includes secure data sync and sharing and 3) devices. It should include a corporate app store so users can select the applications they need with confidence and a secure access gateway so users can access content securely. In short, EMM must be an enterprise-class solution that enables users to access the data they need to do their jobs.

To ensure these mobility errors don’t happen on your watch, look to workspace delivery solutions that integrate all of these capabilities into a single solution for full business mobility.

BYOD may have started small, but today, there are a lot of things to keep track of and you need to pay attention to all of them. See how the Citrix comprehensive approach to delivering mobile workspaces helps you ensure the productivity, satisfaction and security of your mobile workforce.