As remote and hybrid work continue to be the norm, employees are increasingly using their laptops and smartphones to communicate and work. This offers tremendous benefits in terms of flexibility and productivity, but it also introduces complex challenges in managing, supporting, and securing these devices. How do you ensure seamless connectivity, maintain cost-effectiveness, and support your mobile workforce without compromising on security?
Enterprise Mobility Management (EMM) is the answer to these challenges. But what is enterprise mobility management exactly and how can it benefit your business? An enterprise mobility management platform goes beyond just securing remote devices from threats like hacks and viruses. EMM efficiently manages the array of mobile devices within your organization, optimizes resource allocation, and ensures that your employees have the tools they need to succeed, wherever they are.
In this blog post, we’ll explore the multifaceted world of EMM. We’ll delve into how it not only secures your business from digital threats but also streamlines device management, reduces operational costs, and enhances the overall productivity of your workforce.
EMM Definition & Best Practices
EMM (enterprise mobility management) is a comprehensive approach encompassing technologies and best practices for managing and securing mobile devices within an organization. EMM systems are designed to automate the provisioning and configuration of each device, thereby controlling its access capabilities and ensuring compliance with corporate policies.
One major problem with allowing employees to connect their devices to the network freely is that it can create a significant security vulnerability. Malware, viruses, and other malicious code potentially in a person’s laptop may infect your organization without proper enterprise mobility management solutions.
However, while security is a critical aspect of EMM, there are other significant challenges that EMM helps to solve. For instance, the burden on IT departments is substantially reduced. EMM automates many routine tasks such as configuring devices, managing updates, and ensuring compliance — allowing IT staff to focus on more strategic business projects.
Another key aspect of EMM is cost management. EMM solutions provide tools to monitor and optimize the data and call plans associated with mobile devices, ensuring that the company does not incur unnecessary expenses. This includes managing relationships with carriers, negotiating contracts, and ensuring that the company gets the best possible terms.
EMM also plays a crucial role in the administrative management of an organization’s mobile workforce. This includes adding new employees to the system, deleting accounts for those who leave, and managing access to company networks and resources. By centralizing these tasks, EMM makes it easier to manage a large and often geographically dispersed workforce.
EMM also provides a layer of control over the company network and resources. It ensures that employees can access only the data and applications they need, which not only enhances security but also improves efficiency by preventing information overload.
Enterprise Mobility Management is not just about securing mobile devices against digital threats — it’s a multifaceted solution that helps streamline device management, reduce costs, alleviate the IT burden, and ensure efficient use of company resources.
The Benefits of Enterprise Mobility Management Software
What is enterprise mobility management used for? Let’s look more closely at some of the major benefits EMM can offer your organization.
Cross-Device Support
Enterprise mobility management allows your organization to manage and secure a wide variety of mobile devices, operating systems, and hardware specifications with minimal resource constraints. This flexibility allows your employees to bring any device they’re comfortable using, and frees up your staff to focus on core objectives.
Furthermore, this simplifies the implementation of Internet of Things (IoT) devices, which don’t adhere to a typical operating system. You can easily swap them out without having to configure each one extensively.
EMM also helps you become future-proof, allowing you to accommodate new devices and operating systems that are yet to be released.
Comprehensive Data Protection
Enterprise mobility management enhances data security by enforcing protocols on all devices, such as encryption and authentication. This protects data when it’s being transmitted or stored.
An EMM platform also lets you use access control policies to monitor who has access to data. For instance, you can restrict sensitive data only to upper management. Third-party contractors, conversely, should only be able to access a limited set of data and apps relevant to their tasks.
Enhanced Productivity for All Users
Cloud-based enterprise mobility management lets your employees work from any location or time zone by giving them access to the network on their devices. They can run apps, load files, and communicate with colleagues as if they were on the premises.
This is a great productivity enhancer, as it more easily allows those traveling or working remotely to do their jobs as if they were in the office. EMM is especially useful if you have a mostly remote team working in different time zones.
Improved Employee Satisfaction
When EMM is deployed effectively, it can provide a better workplace experience for your employees. It streamlines communication and teamwork, reduces technical issues, and speeds up their work. This ultimately leads to improved work-life balance, enabling employees to manage their personal and professional lives.
Simplified IT Management
Your IT team will also benefit from an EMM. They will have the ability to manage, provision, and monitor all devices from a centralized hub. When you partner with MetTel for Enterprise Mobility solutions, our team performs the provisioning, staging/kitting, over-the-air device enrollment, and monitoring of all devices for you. This alleviates your IT team so they can focus on more revenue-generating projects or company troubleshooting.
Gone are the days of technicians having to work with each person and configure their device physically. EMM makes troubleshooting simple. Instead of using multiple tools for each device type, administrators can simply control the device remotely from their console.
Complete Visibility and Ease of Management
MetTel’s EMM solutions also provide unparalleled visibility and ease of management. Our user-friendly Bruin portal transforms the way businesses handle their mobile device management by offering a suite of powerful tools designed for efficiency and control:
- Expense Management: With MetTel Portal, Powered by Bruin, businesses gain a comprehensive overview of their mobile device expenses. The portal allows for real-time tracking of costs, ensuring that budget allocations for mobile devices are always transparent and under control.
- Inventory and Asset Control: Managing a vast inventory of mobile devices can be a daunting task. Bruin simplifies this by providing a centralized system for tracking every device in the company’s fleet. Whether it’s smartphones, tablets, or laptops, Bruin offers detailed insights into the status, location, and usage of each asset.
- Cost Optimization: Businesses can analyze usage patterns and optimize their mobile plans accordingly. This might involve adjusting data plans to prevent overages, renegotiating contracts with carriers, or identifying opportunities to consolidate services and reduce costs.
- Equipment and Hardware Ordering: Bruin streamlines the process of ordering and deploying new equipment. With an intuitive interface, managers can easily request new devices, track the status of orders, and ensure that the right equipment gets to the right employees promptly. This minimizes downtime and ensures that the workforce is always equipped with the tools they need.
Compliance Adherence
Enterprise mobility management could play a crucial role in helping your organization become more compliant with regulations such as HIPAA, PCI-DSS, and GDPR. EMM helps you enforce security policies and protocols easily on all devices across your organization, helping you adhere to regulations while also lowering the risk of threats, such as hacks and phishing.
Even when a security threat occurs, most EMMs have features that could minimize its impact. For example, administrators can lock and wipe a device remotely if it gets stolen to prevent a data leak. Furthermore, many EMM solutions let you generate reports to prove your compliance, which is vital during audits.
Remote Device Monitoring
Most EMM platforms have remote monitoring capabilities, allowing you to track hundreds of managed devices easily. It can alert administrators if a company phone gets taken out of the premises, for example.
In addition, EMM systems can monitor user activity on each phone, including app and data usage. This can alert you of suspicious activity that could lead to a potential hack.
MetTel’s Fully Managed Mobile Device Management (MDM) Solution
Mobile device management (MDM) is a subset of EMM that deals specifically with mobile devices connecting to your network. Our enterprise mobility solution provides an automated process for configuring each new device to ensure that it aligns with the organization’s security and operational policies.
Our MDM services install and manage leading industry tools such as Microsoft Intune and VMware Workspace ONE, among other robust security and management software. These platforms are integral to our strategy, providing advanced capabilities in device management and security:
- Microsoft Intune: As a part of our MDM solution, Intune plays a pivotal role in managing the applications and data on devices. It allows for the seamless application of security policies, ensuring that all devices comply with your organization’s standards. Intune’s flexibility in managing both iOS and Android devices makes it a versatile tool for diverse enterprise environments.
- VMware Workspace ONE: Workspace ONE is another cornerstone of our MDM offering, delivering an integrated digital workspace platform. It simplifies the management of devices by combining access control, application management, and multi-platform endpoint management. Its user-centric approach ensures a seamless and secure experience for employees accessing corporate resources from any device, anywhere.
MetTel’s fully managed MDM is more than just robust security. MetTel partners with top wireless carriers in the U.S. to provide a fast, reliable, and cost-effective supernetwork that keeps your mobile workforce connected. In fact, we’re leaders in the IoT connectivity space and the largest wholesalers of AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile. We manage your carrier services from start to finish, so you can enjoy the ease of one bill, simplified cross-carrier pooling, and better usage monitoring.
Get Started with MetTel Today
Enterprise device management is quickly becoming a requirement for organizations in every industry. From protecting your data to staying compliant, enterprise mobility management is a crucial part of running a successful business. MetTel provides all the solutions and services you’ll need for an enterprise mobility platform, including our Mobile Device as a Service (MDaaS) and IoT connectivity solutions.
Ready to set up your mobile enterprise management system? Contact us today to learn more.