Now that smart mobile devices are a mainstay in business, the landscape will never be the same again. Your organization needs to have a plan to acquire, manage, maintain, and secure these devices. Businesses generally choose either Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) or Corporate-Owned, Personally Enabled (COPE), depending on their needs.
Today, we want to help you make that choice for your mobile device needs.
How Mobile Device Management Factors In
Regardless of the option you select, you’ll need a way to manage mobile devices on your network.
With mobile device management (MDM), you’ll have a solution to help you keep tabs on your mobile devices through software. Most employees have smartphones, so your business needs to either have a way to manage them or offer its own smartphones for their use. The responsible thing to do is to manage them effectively.
Otherwise, you’re inviting threats onto your network through poor network security practices.
BYOD (Bring Your Own Device)
BYOD allows your team to use their personal devices for work purposes.
Smartphones are expensive tools to purchase for your business, so it is more cost-effective to allow your team to use their own devices (since they already own them anyway). Employees also enjoy the convenience and flexibility of being able to use devices they are already familiar with. They don’t have to learn new software or how to use a new device; they can jump straight to productivity.
However, since such a large portion of the workforce operates remotely (about 12.2% fully remote; 28% part-time), powerful security measures are needed.
Corporate-Owned, Personally-Enabled
The other side of mobile devices for business is COPE, where you provide and manage devices for your employees’ work-related tasks.
With this approach, you don’t have to worry about employees being too laissez-faire with your company data. Instead, you have complete control over the devices, including compliance and security policies. While this is beneficial, you also have to consider that your organization will eat the costs of new hardware and software, which can cause trouble for your budget.
COPE is excellent for businesses with the money to spend, but for SMBs, this is not necessarily possible and is more of a luxury than anything.
Let Us Help You with Procurement
If your business is ready to commit to mobile device usage, we can help.
From procurement to implementation, we can assist your business with its mobile technology needs. We’ll also help with support, monitoring, and securing. You can trust that North Central Technologies will get the work done.
To learn more, call us at 978-798-6805 today.
