With the 4th of July behind us and the rest of summer’s vacation season still ahead, consider how much your company now relies on mobile devices. Are you and your employees checking and answering emails while out of the office? Tracking orders or accessing critical data via the cloud? Managing workloads with customer relationship software? Perhaps deploying responsive websites, mobile apps, or e-commerce sites to keep up with the needs of your clients?
However mobile devices are helping you to operate your business and realize that you’re not alone. According to the IT industry group CompTIA’s 3rd Annual Trends in Enterprise Mobility study, of companies that distribute mobile devices to employees, 76% had deployed smartphones, while 61% had handed out tablets. And over 70% of organizations had invested some resources in mobility solutions.
Yet mobile devices in the small to medium-sized business sphere can present many challenges—and only 30% of the companies surveyed had a formal mobility policy in place. Even scarier, only 8% of those companies could report significant workflow changes as a result of mobile device use.
CMIT Solutions understands the particular obstacles that mobility presents to small and medium-sized organizations—as business owners ourselves, we’ve grappled with many of the same issues as we evolve with the business technology world. That experience has provided us with a knowledge base of common problems and solutions:
1) Getting by with limited resources. Like a lot of current technology, mobility is expensive. From device integration to remote support to application development to simply buying the darn phones and tablets, the field often requires specialized skills, updated infrastructure, and increased bandwidth that many small firms may not possess. A trusted IT partner can secure what you need to manage your mobile devices—at a price you can afford.
2) Balancing user needs with IT requirements. Mobile device use can empower employees to work in more efficient and productive ways—but it can also place a strain on existing service capabilities. Whether you have one IT employee who’s stretched thin by mobility’s new demands or an altogether nonexistent IT department, we can provide the support needed to move into the brave new future.
3) Integrating devices so that they work to their full potential. So you’ve got a fleet of mobile devices ready to be deployed—and a handful of employees ready to use them. But are everyone’s email accounts, contact books, and calendars properly synced? Are network connections and backup options properly activated? Buying devices is great—making sure they work correctly is even better.
4) To BYOD or not to BYOD. 55% of U.S. companies surveyed for CompTIA’s recent study have implemented some form of bring your own device (BYOD) policies—and most of those provide devices while also allowing employees to supply their own. BYOD opens a wide range of potential problems, however, not least of which are data encryption, proper security settings, and backup options.
5) Wiping and resetting devices when necessary. Another major danger of BYOD is what happens when an employee leaves the company. Smartphones and tablets save crucial information—location-based GPS coordinates; contact details; call, message, email, and web browsing history; personal photos and passwords; even health-related information. All of this can be compromised if a phone is stolen or improperly discarded—and all of it can put your business at risk thanks to one bad decision by one rogue employee. Ensuring you use the highest level of security when wiping and reformatting your mobile devices is a crucial part of the mobility puzzle.
With the new norm quickly becoming three devices for each employee, mobility isn’t a trend that’s going to die off. If you want to put the advantages of mobile devices used to work for your company while avoiding the problems and pitfalls that come with it, contact CMIT Solutions today. We specialize in mobile device management packages designed to keep business technology running smoothly and data secure, all with regular, predictable pricing that allows business owners to budget with confidence.