Reader Forum: Take a load off your customers – manage mobility for them

Editor’s Note: Welcome to our weekly Reader Forum section. In an attempt to broaden our interaction with our readers we have created this forum for those with something meaningful to say to the wireless industry. We want to keep this as open as possible, but maintain some editorial control so as to keep it free of commercials or attacks. Please send along submissions for this section to our editors at:dmeyer@ardenmedia.com or tford@ardenmedia.com.
It’s no secret that mobility is becoming absolutely critical for businesses of all shapes and sizes.
But with the broader use and acceptance of mobility solutions within enterprises comes a number of challenges that need to be adequately addressed in order for mobile devices to have the same level of security, management and overall satisfaction that employees have enjoyed on traditional desktops for years.
Many enterprises – even large Fortune 500 companies – simply do not have the resources to support mobile services, and a harsh economy is forcing them to make hard decisions on which IT projects get the green light. With limited budgets and growing mobility business needs, companies are striking the right balance by partnering with their service providers to come up with a different model: mobility as a service.
The evolution of mobility as a service
Within the very popular category of cloud computing, “as a service” business models are taking hold at many types of businesses, whether small and mid-size companies or all the way up to large multi-national enterprises. Unlike outsourcing, which offloads processes or functions out-of-house, an as-a-service, or cloud model is a more agile, cost-effective way of doing business.
Rather than paying a lot for an infrastructure that might never be fully utilized, an enterprise can turn to a service provider to provide a particular functionality on a pay-as-you-go basis.
Service providers have a golden opportunity in a world of cloud services. They can capture the interest of new customers and hold onto existing ones by branching out into the managed services space and offering mobility as an on-demand service. Providers already have a network infrastructure and the expertise in many areas pertaining to mobility, and enterprises are showing a willingness to outsource these functions.
According to VDC Research, 27% of enterprise mobility users polled use managed mobility services, with an additional 20% currently or planning to evaluate a managed service solution during the next year. The research firm forecasts that of 17 million mobile devices shipped in 2009 that support enterprise mobility applications, 20% of them – or about 3 million – are supported through a managed service model.
Enterprises are adopting mobile managed services because they:
–Ease adoption and provide seamless integration with back-end systems;
–Simplify end-user mobility;
–Introduce cost control in order to reach a higher cost efficiency;
–Ease maintenance, operation and management for the IT infrastructure
–Lead to higher ROI and lower TCO;
–Improve mobile worker productivity;
–Improve real-time decision-making.
With only a modest investment in shared infrastructure and a web browser, enterprises can quickly mobilize their information workers through a managed mobility service. These services provide enterprises with broad device support. They remove the security, management and administration burden from IT, and they integrate with back-end systems such as billing and telecom expense management or provisioning.
Verizon Communications Inc. and Orange, early entrants in the mobility-as-a-service space, are already offering managed mobility services. Their customers can choose from managed services for mobile security, mobile device management and application management.
Mobile security enforces PIN code access, sets lock/wipe policies, encrypts devices and data cards, delivers firewall and antivirus capabilities to devices, and introduces mobile VPNs. Mobile device management identifies what applications and software are allowed on devices, pushes software and applications to devices, creates policies across devices or for individual users, and implements mobile policies. Application management deploys new applications, enhances existing applications, and mobilizes business processes and desktop applications.
Mobile security and device management for mobile managed services
For most enterprises, security and device management are the most difficult challenges they face when supporting a mobile workforce. A managed mobility service can solve these security and device management concerns without taxing IT resources. By definition mobility involves devices leaving the safety of the corporate network and firewall, and enterprises expect service providers to have a sound security plan for keeping devices and data secure. Best practices for mobile security include:
–On-device password and data encryption;
–Remote device kill and data deletion for lost or stolen devices;
–Antivirus and firewall protection for handheld devices, including call filtering;
–Remote delivery of Win32 security patch updates;
–Over-the-air encryption.
Device management is another top concern for enterprises. As the smartphone market continues to expand, enterprises want to support each type of device rather than define a single device as a corporate standard. The ability to support multiple mobile devices has wide appeal among enterprises.
A managed mobile service offering should include these aspects of mobile device management:
–Remote distribution of software and software updates;
–Remote distribution of information and content;
–Remote tracking of assets, hardware and software inventory;
–Remote management of OS and software patches;
–Remote tracking of software license compliance;
–Remote maintenance of device configurations to corporate standards;
–Remote backup and restoration of data.
Managed mobility services add new revenue
With resources scarcer than ever, many IT departments are running on skeleton crews and have to stretch what resources they do have to keep their data centers up and running, manage users in different geographies and workplace settings and keep software and hardware up-to-date. Managed mobility solutions offer these organizations a viable option for enterprises that are feeling the IT crunch.
With mobility as a service being positioned as an alternative for companies that normally would have to build their own mobility solution, the market is ripe for carriers, operators and system integrators to offer these new revenue-generating services. Managed mobility services will help retain customers and gain new ones, create additional revenue streams and leverage economies of scale to deliver services quickly to new customers.
Rather than being relegated to the position of “dumb pipe” or simple bit carriers, service providers need to look beyond their historic areas of strength and revenues and find other ways to drive new business. Managed mobility presents a great opportunity to provide expertise in security, device management and application management and offer enterprises a one-stop solution for mobility services.