Enterprise Mobility [Challenges]

Mobility is an inevitable part of our lives at home and in the workplace. Fortunately, or unfortunately, it created a solid bridge between homes and workplaces. In some ways, employers can easily access their employees; however, the privacy of employees are affected by this easy accessibility.

The reality is that we cannot do business without the use of mobile devices any more. Mobility is an essential part of the enterprise. It touches every aspect of the enterprise. We cannot have a digital workplace without proper mobility architecture in place. We cannot have a modern enterprise without including the mobility to the equation. Due to these compelling reasons, we must approach mobility from strategic and architectural perspectives to properly integrate it into the culture and ecosystem of the modernising enterprise.

Lifecycle management for mobile devices is an essential architectural consideration. Managing mobile devices can be daunting from many angles. The life cycle for mobile devices can be much more dynamic and shorter than traditional computing and telecommunication devices.

Another architectural challenge related to mobile devices is dealing with increasing quantity.  In the past, there were only office phones and people even used to share them. Nowadays, workers have multiple mobile phones. Having multiple mobile devices per person may equate to thousands of mobile devices to consider at the enterprise level. In addition to quantity, the user in the enterprise may change the mobile devices frequently. These frequent changes require consideration of applications and software updates for these devices. 

Enterprise modernisation strategies must consider the challenges associated with these mobile devices. Enterprise Architects need to create dynamic and flexible governance to address the concerns related to the use and lifecycle management of these devices.

Security tops in terms of challenges of mobility in the enterprise. The security implications of mobile devices are exponentially increasing. These devices create many security vulnerabilities. Software updates can be persistent and very frequent. Frequent updates and patching can create a massive workload for the IT support departments.

Use of these mobile devices increases information consumption in the enterprise dramatically. Security control of the data can be demanding too. These security implications cross the data and application domains; hence, a collaborative effort among the Security, Data, and Application Architects are essential. Enterprise Architects can coordinate this collaboration across other architectural domains in the enterprise.

These critical challenges created by mobile devices are real, evident, and ubiquitous in the enterprise.  Therefore, our enterprise modernisation initiatives must consider these challenges and find practical and innovative ways to address them.  One of the approaches is to use a Unified Endpoint Management (UEM) practice. UEM includes relevant software tools and centralised management interfaces for consumers. This centralisation is necessary to improve the security capabilities and also allow a collaborative content sharing for the consumers and other stakeholders. It becomes essential to introduce UEM to our enterprise modernisation program structure.