Given the prevalence of mobile devices in the workplace, a lot of enterprises have embraced an EMM strategy. But if you are looking to get your feet wet in this domain you might get confused with the barrage of acronyms and options you have there. So let us help you navigate the waters:
BYOD (Bring Your Own Device): Is basically when employees can use their personal devices for business tasks.
COPE (Corporate Owned, Personally Enabled): The counterpart to BYOD, where the enterprise owns the devices and the employees configure the device to suit their needs.
MDM (Mobile Device Management): This was the first solution to the ‘infiltration’ of mobile into the workspace. As the name suggests, with this solution employers would have the power to manage and control the entire device. Common examples would be to force a passcode for the device or to remotely wipe all the data from a lost device. While an MDM solution might work for a COPE scenario, it was highly unpopular with employees that embraced the BYOD use case. This was because employers now had the power to delete both work and personal data on a mobile device.
Clearly a better solution was required to manage the growing number of mobile devices in the workplace. Enter EMM!
EMM (Enterprise Mobility Management): This is a solution or suite, which includes MDM, but adds other capabilities to the mix. The essential components of EMM are:
MDM: Which we just covered above.
MAM (Mobile Application Management): Here the controls are provided at an application level. An example could be to force an app to use a particular VPN. MAM can be achieved by app wrapping, through enterprise stores or through containerization. Note that the containerization can happen at an app level or device level.
MCM (Mobile Content Management): The controls here are provided at the content level. Using policies you can manage access to repositories as well as what you can do with data- for instance copy/paste restrictions. As part of MCM, you can also push data to devices. Containers can help you achieve this aspect as well.
You can pick and choose from the above capabilities to suit your particular deployment. Device containers are getting increasingly popular where you can manage the entire ‘work profile’ while having no control over the employee’s ‘personal profile’, an example of which is enabled by Google’s Android Enterprise (previously referred to as Android For Work) solution.
Do checkout the Workspace Product provided by Pulse to see how it can solve your mobility problems.