Workplaces today are undergoing a historic shift. Time zones and locations have increasingly become irrelevant as executives spend days outside office?meeting customers, visiting sites or for making a sales pitch.
Consider this, according to The Yankee Group Anywhere Enterprise - Large: 2007 Fixed-Mobile Convergence Survey, on an average 36% of employees spend a day or more away from their primary workspace. By 2011, 4 6.6 million corporate employees will spend at least one day a week teleworking globally, and an additional 112 million will work from home at least one day a month.
Today?s dynamic business environment calls for business agility and responsiveness for companies even if they have a world-class product/service. This requires access to business applications at all points of time and in all locations. The boundaries between laptop computers, wireless phones and messaging devices are getting increasingly blurred. In India, where broadband access is limited, mobile-based solutions present many transformational ideas.
Reduction in overall hardware and bandwidth costs and a rapid expansion of wireless infrastructure across the country augurs well for the solutions ecosystem that has been making rapid strides in innovation. For example, converged wireless solutions on mobile are being adopted by professionals and organisations today, as more and more business is conducted out of the office.
Global organisations are increasingly challenged to deliver critical business applications and real-time data to employees and sales team in the field. Remote access to business-critical data and applications is fast becoming a norm enabling organiations quick decision making and gaining competitive edge.
Mobile devices can enable an organisation to take its traditional computing infrastructure and extend it to its mobile workforce by taking simple (Excel, Word and Outlook) as well as critical business applications (CRM and ERP) to mobile devices. Users can experience measurable and quantifiable improvements when these critical business applications are extended to their handsets.
Unfortunately, creating, deploying and managing an enterprise-class mobility solution is not as easy or as cost-effective as CIOs and IT managers might have hoped. Let?s take a look at the challenges that business and IT managers face when managing such solutions.
Implementing rules and procedures access: Actual results fall short of expectation because improper implementation of rules and procedures can result in failure of entire mobile infrastructure. For example, improper access to sensitive data (wrong data access to wrong person) can result in the failure of mobile enterprise.
Information security: One of the top challenges CIOs see in terms of managing mobile workforces is security. For example, lost or stolen mobile devices can leave companies vulnerable to unwanted and unauthorised access to proprietary and sensitive data on the company, its customers, and partners.
IT Infrastructure: Often, companies believe that managing a mobility solution is the same as managing a traditional IT solution?which results in their underestimating the unique requirements of a mobile solution. The fact is the more mobile a workforce, the more difficult it is to manage and provide support from a central hub. Providing fast access to data over a wireless network demands advanced technologies and captive bandwidth.
What works and what can companies do?
Seamless deployment: Mobile devices are only useful if they create minimal disruptions to the current way users conduct business. Technologies must be seamlessly deployed into the work environment in order to facilitate user acceptance.
Seamless ?select? access: Enterprise mobility can only be successful if information accessibility is defined as per the levels of the organisation. For example, a regional sales manager of an organisation should have access to sales data across the region but he has no use of data entered by area sales officer as daily updates. Hence it?s highly critical to define the information access levels.
Security and compliance: Data encryption, password protection, user authentication, and the ability to remotely lock down a device are extremely critical for any enterprise mobility solutions. For example, the Verisign Identity Protection (VIP) authentication provides identity protection for customers interacting online. VIP authentication service integrates with customers existing Web site to strengthen and streamline its network security.
Source: The Fionancial Express
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