Managing Mobility Is a Major IT Challenge
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Managing Mobility Is a Major IT Challenge
From uncontrolled roaming costs to user negligence causing overages to data loss, managing mobility can be a major challenge for IT managers. -
Document Policies and Communicate Them
Ensure that your organization has business rules that govern usage and that everyone is aware of them. Stay flexible so that mobility continues to enable employees. Review the rules often to make sure they have a true business purpose. -
Monitor and Understand the User Base
Know your employees, their usage patterns and potential areas of risk. This is essential to managing enterprise mobility. You can't manage what you don't understand. -
Enforce Acceptable Use Policy
Enforce your acceptable use policy and reduce your risk exposure. "Not safe for work" content can jeopardize relationships with customers and trigger lawsuits for HR violations. -
Limit Domestic Usage
By putting limits on domestic use, you control data use immediately and eliminate "bill shock." Caps reduce data used daily without impacting productivity. Do this two ways: enforcement and simplifications. -
User Response to Domestic Usage Limits
When users are aware of their limits, they tend to police their own usage. And when caps are reached, any blocks on the cellular interface will force users to find Wi-Fi services that allow them to maintain connectivity. -
Limit Roaming Usage
Roaming can create the biggest item on an enterprise mobility bill, but by capping it before anyone travels, enterprises protect their data allocation, save data and prevent overages. Be mindful of what you whitelist because that can allow business-critical usage to continue beyond the specified threshold. -
Control Tethering
A phone tethered to a laptop or tablet can consume a vast amount of mobile data. By monitoring tethering and limiting it when necessary, you can reduce significant data costs. Used in conjunction with domestic and roaming, caps can help the enterprise manage financial risks. -
Compress Mobile Data
Compressing the data that travels to the mobile device also saves data. While not all data is compressible, you can compress video or photos. -
Eliminate Noise
Mobility can help employees stay productive, but also introduces distractions. Eliminate the noise and reduce access to productivity-draining games and social media content. That not only helps keep people focused, it helps control costs. -
Interest in Layered Protection
Invest in: A multi-level solution that helps protect the device and its configuration as well as the apps on it. Websites accessed in real time. Infrastructure. Wi-Fi hotspots. -
Monitor Threats and Educate Users
No solution can protect you 100% from threats. User training is a must. Find out what threats users encounter daily and train them to stop accessing phishing websites and downloading their malware. -
Help Employees Protect Themselves
It's in your company's best interest to help your employees protect themselves and ensure that they are not the weakest links in the chain.
Enterprise mobility presents numerous benefits: increased productivity, potential cost savings and improved employee morale. It comes with many potential risks. Between "bill shock" from uncontrolled roaming costs to user negligence causing unmanaged overages to to data loss, managing mobility can be a major challenge. With increasingly sophisticated and more frequent cyber-threats targeting mobile users and technology advancing faster than ever, security often takes a backseat to speed and convenience. The explosion of mobility presents financial, compliance and security risks that must be proactively addressed and continually managed. Michael Covington, vice president of Product at Wandera, a provider of mobile data management and security, said "Enterprise IT needs to make a more concerted effort to manage mobility by establishing acceptable use policies, monitoring data usage in real-time and protecting mobile devices, users and data from security threats that span a spectrum of attack vectors. Administrators need to be proactive and look beyond just configuration to manage risks in real-time." Here are 12 tips to effectively manage the risks associated with enterprise mobility.