Create a Mobile Device Management Strategy in 6 Easy Steps

By Patricia Ross

Topics: Mobile Device Management (MDM)

When it comes to navigating your organization’s mobility management, you may encounter a few pitfalls along the way. As a leading managed mobility services (MMS) provider and trusted advisor for all things mobility, Vox Mobile wants to help you stay on the right path.

We spoke with a team of mobility experts to provide a well-rounded view of the challenges customers face when striking out on their own when it comes to mobile device management (MDM) and the best practices you need to map out an effective MDM strategy.

Barring your path to MDM optimization

When it comes to developing a strategy for managing an organization’s mobile fleet, often more is left up to chance than planned out. This can at best create a few roadblocks and at worse have you completely out of your element and vulnerable to a wide array of hazards.

Setting yourself up for data leakage or a data breach
Clashes between C-suite and IT over security, roles, and safety protocols
Less than optimal participation when employees don’t like the user experience
Wasting time in trying different things just to end up going nowhere
Paying engineers (which is very expensive) even if your “plan” didn’t work
Needing new tech because your platform may not be built out to scale with you
Overlapping technology, adding platforms instead a comprehensive solution
Ending up with an outcome that doesn’t match your initial goal and having to start again
Lack the in-house experience to manage your mobility, creating inefficiencies and headaches

Can you afford any of these? Whether you’re developing a mobile device management strategy for the platform you already have in place or are looking to add an MDM, there are 6 milestones you must consider in order to ensure your mobility is managed properly and efficiently.

6 steps to achieve MDM readiness

Use Cases

“Knowing how your users are going to use their mobile devices is critical. That is your starting point for profiles, security, identity, and access,” advises Matthew Cross, Vox Mobile’s Senior Director of Technology Services. If the user experience is not on-point, you will have less participation which not only hinders productivity, but also creates gaps in your security as users bypass protocols. Tristan Stitz, Technical Pre-sales Engineer at Vox Mobile adds, “Even if you already have an MDM in place, you need to vet it from an end-user perspective. Each platform has its own nuances and the one you have may not be the best one for your business.” Comparing features, costs, and flexibility can give you a clear picture into what you need to ensure your mobility outcomes are met.

Identity and Access Management

What internal resources do you want users to access and how do you want to configure those profiles? Security settings and applications must align with the end-user experience, but not leave any gaps that can be exploited. “Consider how users are going to enroll and access applications using different platforms,” says Ross De Costa, Vox Mobile’s Senior Enterprise Mobility Consultant. “WorkspaceONE, InTune, and Okta all have unique features that need to be taken into account.” He also advises to give your users unified access and multi-factor authentication to increase security.

Profile Management

One profile does not fit all when it comes to mobility management. “The role a person plays in your organization often determines their profile and what that profile can do,” says Cross. “For instance, upper management has different security protocols than IT. You don’t want to give someone in IT an open device because they could accidently send critical info that could affect everyone in your organization.” You also want to make the device do what the user wants it to do. “If a user switches roles, because of profile management, the apps on their device should switch accordingly, as well as following users across their devices to ensure they have a consistent user experience.”

Security Management

“When it comes to security, think about the ‘principle of least privilege,’” advised Stitz. That’s only giving people access to what they need to do their job. He adds, “Even though you’re securely delivering an application, there is an inherent risk in even having the application available. If the user doesn’t need access to the application, they it should not be on their device.” This closes the door on anything accidentally happening that could compromise your security and escalate your overall risk.

Application Management

With the transformation to a remote or hybrid workforce, some organizations did the quick and easy thing of giving everyone all the business applications they had, even if they we’re applicable to their roles. In addition to being a security risk, as noted above, it can also negatively impact the user experience. Tailoring apps to the specific person and their role make it a lot easier for users to navigate their apps and enhance their productivity. “A marketing manager should only be enrolled in marketing apps, not the finance apps,” explains Stitz. De Costa adds, “It’s important to segment out your workforce at the granular level when it comes to application management.”

Device Enrollment

How are devices—both corporate owned and BYOD—going to be enrolled? Is this going to fall to the system administrator or to the employees? A mobile device management platform can streamline the enrollment process, but you first have to decide how that is going to take place. Each MDM has its own enrollment manager to make bulk enrollment or self-enrollment, using an invite sent to user, easy.

Your personal guide to MDM

It’s difficult to understand all there is to know about mobile device management. Vox Mobile simplifies mobility management for you. Along each milestone, you can get the answers you need from your mobility consultant, to build an MDM strategy that delivers the outcomes you expect.

A solution may look great on paper, but what’s the real story? What does it actually do and how can that help you? Our enterprise mobility consultants know all the intricacies and can help you make the best decision.

“We can also help you vet the solution that is best for your organization. We look at use cases and can put those up against the platforms that are out there,” explains De Costa. “Depending on your level of identity management, access, applications you may have already outgrown some of those platforms.”

Stitz adds, “We can recommend the integrations that are best for your business both for your current needs and tomorrows demands. Costs factor in, but we help you look at all possibilities before decisions are made.”

If you don’t deal with MDM all day every day, it can be very difficult, and incredibly time consuming to research all the MDM features and how they can benefit your business. And why would you when Vox Mobile’s team can do it for you. We live and breathe managed mobility (because that’s all we do) so who better to help you navigate every step of your mobility journey.