First of all, mobile devices is not just about mobile phones, it includes Mobile handsets, Tablets, Laptops etc.
With mobile devices and applications flooding the market, it’s not a surprise that people are using their mobile devices for personal use and for office use. It’s this mix of usage that makes it important for enterprises to control and protect the entrprise data and configuration settings on the mobile devices. In another scenario, the device might be owned by the enterprise and given to the employee for official use. The very nature of the device being mobile (not located in one place), makes it complex for the enterprise to manage the device as per enterprise IT policy.
The application used to manage these mobile devices and the applications installed on these devices is called mobile device management.
Mobile device management also means the ability to manage mobile apps that are on each enterprise device. Enterprises can deploy, manage, block or remove rogue apps on individual or groups of devices, ensuring productivity is high, reducing the risk of dangerous mobile malware.
Morover it gives the enterprise the power to manage multiple hybrid platform devices from single application. This MDM also acts like a firewall for the mobile device, restricting data flow.
Another most important aspect of mobile devices is the high probability of getting lost. MDM relates to this scenario by the capability to erase the data on the mobile device remotly thus ensuring ZERO data theft.
The following are few of the MDM software products available in the market -
- SAP Afaria MDM platform
- Airwatch from VMWare
- Fibrelink from IBM
- Symantec, the antivirus software company
How does MDM work – having setup the MDM server on the cloud or within your premises, you will have to ask your employees to download a thin mobile application on the mobile devices. Once the mobile application is downloaded, configuration is needed to make it connect to the MDM server. Once the connection is established, the server pushes the policies to the devices based on the platform. This process is called device enrollment is now said to be controlled centrally by the enterprise.
Having enrolled the device, if the enterprise rolls out mobile applications for it’s employees, it just has to deploy it once on the MDM server. The MDM pushes the application to all the enrolled devices as per the policy defined.
We at technologia can help you in evaluating, installation and managing MDM platforms. Contact us using our website.