The mobile phone market has changed a lot in the past few years. Many phones aren’t just phones now; they have larger screens, better keyboards and even support touch screen, can run applications, browse the Internet, easily check email, and do non-business things such as play music and take pictures. One of them even acts as a flashlight!
For those who are old enough to remember the personal computer market in the 1980’s, they may see some similarities here – different devices running different types of non-compatible operating systems, and very much a “personal” device. We seem to be back to the “wild wild west” here when it comes to mobile device management.
Yet as users ask for the capability to check their corporate email and access corporate data, IT has legitimate concerns to address – in particular security. What happens if sensitive data is on a device – either in email or in an application – and the mobile device is lost or stolen? In most organizations, IT is not able to dictate what type of phone someone is using, or what carrier they use. They can recommend, but for companies with geographically dispersed locations, it may be impossible to have a standard carrier, and the carrier may dictate which devices are available. Some examples of this:
- AT&T and T-Mobile work well in large US cities but not in less dense areas, and can get signals in many parts of Europe.
- Verizon works just about anywhere in the US but not at all in Europe.
This can be quite a challenge for IT. If you offer mobile applications on certain devices, then you will have the capability to suggest which types of phones are used, and can more easily monitor them. Otherwise, it may be more a matter of deciding which phones you can support based on their monitoring capability from your favorite management application (which is often a reflection of market share) and their ability to do things such as remote wipe, encryption, and apply Active Directory policies such as enforcing password length and lockout times.
It will be interesting to watch how this develops going forward.
