Debunking Popular Mobility Myths

As technologies and their use cases evolve, we often hold onto temporary truths (such as “cloud computing isn’t secure enough for enterprises”) long after they are no longer true. This form of myth preservation is natural but prevents organizations from taking timely advantage of important technological advances and may lead to a variety of challenges, including lower productivity, higher costs, less security and reduced competitiveness. This is certainly true with mobility.

Here are two often-strongly-held beliefs that companies may want to reexamine, to maximize the benefits from their mobility initiatives.

Myth 1: IT must add a new client management system for each new device or use case.

Many customers I talk with rely on multiple (as many as ten!) different systems to support the devices their business users need: PCs, Macs, iPads, iPhones, Android tablets and smartphones, BlackBerries, etc.… the list goes on.

One would have to question if this is a reasonable, viable approach.

Why? Because supporting multiple solutions is very expensive. In addition to multiple purchasing processes and licenses, you must spend far too much time keeping each solution up-to-date and moving from solution to solution to manage devices. Oftentimes, this also means repeating configuration information and user profiles in multiple systems, which can introduce errors. Multiple systems may also result in complex integration projects that cost too much and slow time-to-value. Worst of all, the complexity of managing multiple systems can undercut intended user productivity benefits and open the door to security issues.

Here’s an example of what could happen by using different systems: what if you give users restricted rights to a data set from PCs but forget to put the same restrictions on mobile devices? Security may be compromised. Likewise, if you give executives broad access from PCs but forget to do the same on mobile devices, productivity can suffer.

Comprehensive solutions that let you manage all devices (including servers and desktops) from a single application are now being introduced to the market. Even better, some of these solutions are extremely easy to deploy and allow organizations to start small and continue using existing systems, moving new devices over as time allows.

Myth 2: You can’t have it all with BYOD: security, privacy and productivity.

Those who still believe this may not be aware of all the exciting recent developments in this space. For many organizations, the technology now is readily available to support BYOD environments with the precise and individualized balance of security, privacy and productivity that each organization requires and desires.

Today’s comprehensive management solutions let IT set fine-grained policies across many devices, making it relatively straightforward to enforce well-conceived and well-balanced policies developed by representatives from HR, legal, compliance, security and business users. When such solutions are combined with regular training on why data security is important and the need for users to be diligent, the risks from implementing a BYOD strategy are no greater than those of any business activity or initiative.

With Dell’s mobility solutions, organizations can have it all. By deploying a robust, scalable, price-performing and flexible enterprise mobility management solution, you can enable employees to be more productive while increasing security and driving down costs.