Mobility offers organizations a significant opportunity to improve customer engagement and drive business forward. From expanding markets through new mobile application models to securely communicating with upstream suppliers, the mobile opportunity to improve engagement can be seen throughout the entire value chain. But as with many opportunities there are obstacles to overcome. A strong balance of enablement and protection is key to a mobile strategy.
Along with the opportunities mobility presents, the proliferation of wireless devices running operating systems such as iOS and
Android, the variety of mobile application types, the increase in multi-device users and the shift to bring your own device (BYOD) to work also has created many challenges when forming a mobile strategy:
- Existing web applications don't support new mobile models.
- Access management solutions support web applications, but don't always support mobile applications.
- Legacy data protection solutions secure the device but not the data.
- Uncertainty around liability issues as personal devices are brought into the office.
- Usability and privacy expectations.
If not addressed properly, the end result is missed opportunity, user dissatisfaction and increased security and compliance risks to the organization. Organizations need a unified end to end solution to help solve these challenges.
But it's not easy. There are a ton of mobile security solutions in the marketplace today, each with pros and cons that organizations have to make decisions on: Identity and Access Management, Mobile Application Management, Mobile Device Management, Virtual Desktop Infrastructure, Classification, Data Loss Prevention, encryption, etc.
Businesses can do themselves a big favor and cut through a lot of the noise if they first focused on what's most important: driving business forward and protecting the data. If they thought about making their decisions across two axes, customer engagement and data-centric security, they'd be able to make the right tradeoffs and be on their way to driving more business through the mobile channel while effectively mitigating information risks.
Please join our webcast on July 24th as we discuss the mobile opportunities businesses are attempting to capitalize on; the readiness, security and usability challenges that must be overcome; and various security solutions businesses can take advantage of to reach their mobile customer engagement goals.
Mobile phone image from wikipedia.