Hyper-Connected World Is the Future: What Role Does MDM Play in It?
Connected Intelligence
Ever since the first iPhone was introduced to the world in 2007, smart phones have sneaked their way into our daily lives. Since then, we’ve been so engrossed in our devices that they have managed to completely turn our professional and personal lives upside down.
With the introduction of smart devices, an entire world of the Internet of Things (IoT) emerged. This age embarked on the journey to seamlessly connect people to information, businesses, as well as other individuals. Today, IoT has grown exponentially to create global networks that can openly connect data, machines and people with each other. In fact, by 2020 many surveys projected there will be an astounding 26- 100 billion connected devices “things” globally¹.
IoT Paired with Mobility
Fast-paced business scenarios, immeasurable consumer demands for technology and the ongoing COVID 19 pandemic have automatically pushed the world to pace towards a hyper-connected world. Long gone are the days when computers were the heart and soul of a business. With everyone adopting the new remote culture, enterprises have adequately begun utilizing mobile devices to get the work done. To promote more flexibility among employees and business workflows, the traditional workforce started demanding more mobile, flexible technologies, like laptops, tablets and smartphones for work. Mobile devices firmly established themselves into the modern enterprise infrastructures across all industries, including education and healthcare and those with a large frontline or deskless workforce.
Despite 70% of organizations admitting that mobile devices are critical to revenue growth, several enterprises have still not adopted mobility². These companies are engulfed with an array of reasons to not embrace mobility. They believe “why break something that’s not broken”. With a technologically hostile staff, enormous budget constraints and hesitation to implement the approach, enterprise mobility took a backseat for several conventionally operating businesses.
The March Towards Enterprise Mobility
COVID-19 however, brought unprecedented times that most businesses failed to envision. Enterprise mobility has become an unavoidable necessity to shift focus toward the ‘mobile’ style of working. With rapid advancements taking place in the wireless infrastructure, connectivity has become ubiquitous.
The importance of adopting enterprise mobility solutions cannot be stressed enough. Mobile technology, today, has evolved to enable enterprise email and data on the go and provide advanced applications as solutions that can potentially change how enterprises carry out business operations.
Integrating different location-based services, like mobile payment processing, social networks, low-cost device add-ons have simplified enterprise ecosystems and promoted smoother business operations. Additionally, the rise in highly competitive markets, compliance pressures and data security have made it instrumental for enterprises to have high-performance, high-quality and high availability of business-critical software and data under a tightly secure environment.
With enterprises realizing the impact of powerful mobile presence on improving business agility and delivering superior customer service, there has been an increased usage of mobile medium to offer innovative solutions, reducing operational costs and overhead, creating new revenue streams and enabling informed decisions accompanied by taking timely actions.
Device Security in Times of Enterprise Mobility
With more than 85% of enterprises adopting Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) programs, employees can easily access company resources anywhere and anytime, leading to an increase in productivity and enhanced employee satisfaction³.
The enterprise mobility and BYOD trends have made securing multiple mobile platforms (and the corporate data stored within it) challenging for enterprises and their IT teams. Now more than ever, there’s an indispensable need for an improved, sleek and sophisticated device management tool to ensure device and data security remotely. When it comes to both BYOD and corporate-owned devices, the IT staff mandatorily needs to track all the assets assigned to employees, manage data access and passwords and create user or department profiles from a centralized dashboard.
The Need for MDM for a Hyper-connected World
Enterprises implement a Mobile Device Management (MDM) solution to promote mobility and security of their devices. A surplus increase in mobile device usage has made it difficult to manage and secure data; therefore, businesses have full-fledged adopted MDM technology to manage all types of devices and secure information across geographies. With an MDM, IT teams can successfully manage their employees' mobile devices. MDMs guard the corporate network, secure mobile devices, thereby ensuring devices have more functionalities to offer.
The MDM market was valued at USD 3.40 billion in 2020. It can cross USD 10.67 billion by 2026, with a CAGR of 21% over the forecast period 2021 - 2026⁴. In the future, MDM solutions will empower IT to increasingly focus on broader enterprise mobility management solutions to better serve mobile opportunities for employees.
Mobile device management is essential for enterprise mobility because it can help businesses save time on security and control protocols. An MDM paves the way for efficient and robust device management and offers the option for enhanced flexibility for the remote workforce. While MDM is already an essential part of many industries, the future will witness wide use of MDM solutions by businesses of all sizes across geographies.
