For SMEs, the hurdle is primarily around cost of ownership

How do you envisage the evolution of MDM solutions? What are certain aspects of MDMs that you are looking at in the future?

Smartphones and tablets have altered the way a workplace functions. While they have greatly increased mobility and productivity for employees, the data and information security threats for the organization have increased considerably. Studies reveal that around 21 percent of phones face a security breach due to unsecured internet access. Enterprises, large and small, are grappling with the challenges of managing these unsecured devices.

Enterprise mobility has come a long way in the last decade. It started essentially with employees being able to access their email and calendar while on the move. Today, email is just one of the work related applications an employee can access while on the move. Smartphone and tablet give employee access to a plethora of business related applications beyond email and calendar.  These could be standard applications for document creation or proprietary applications related to sales, service ticket management, and access to policies among others.

The challenge arises because the lines between personal and the official are blurring from an employee perspective and the same device is being used for both purposes. MDM functionality has moved from managing the device to not only managing the device but managing the applications being run on the device as well. Over a period of time, we see MDM also being used as a platform for trouble-shooting business applications used by the employee which is why our solution supports this feature.

What are some of the present hurdles with the adoption of MDM solutions in the Indian context?

There are numerous hurdles which enterprises face with respect to adoption of MDM solutions in India. For large enterprises the challenge usually is more internal in the sense they need to address how to enforce information security and MDM policies in this BYOD era. The smartphone and tablet most often is the property of the employee who, needless to say, has concerns about the organization “snooping” around his personal information.

For SMEs, the hurdle is primarily around cost of ownership. Most MDM OEMs require upfront investments and do not provide cloud based solutions which makes MDM a very expensive proposition for SMEs.

Tata Docomo’s MDM service addresses both these concerns. The BYOD features of the platform helps address the employee’s privacy concerns and since this is a cloud based solution, it can be deployed quickly and in a cost effective manner for any enterprise that does not want to make capital investments.

How is BYOD changing the corporate and enterprise space? What are some of the best practices in an MDM solutions providers approach towards security for open source systems?

The ‘bring your own device’ movement is causing quite a few challenges for organizations across the world. It is forcing CIOs to think about how to strike the right balance between the employee’s right to keep his data private and enterprise who wants to deploy the necessary checks and balances over the devices the employee uses to access his work related data. It’s not an easy task and unfortunately many organizations are taking a “wait and watch” approach rather than taking a stand.

The BYOD trend holds immense potential for an organization because it brings in more agility into the business, transforming the way the employees interact with each other, their partners and their customers. The organization will need to implement a solution which ensures objectives of risk mitigation and compliance to policies are met while addressing the employee’s concerns regarding privacy.

Tata Docomo’s MDM solutions helps CIOs address these very challenges. The Platform has a specific BYOD module which while addressing the employee’s privacy concern, enables the IT team to monitor and ensure compliance to information security policies. MDM solutions which only address the organization’s information security concerns without addressing the employee’s needs will not see successful deployments.

What is the impact that MDM has had on the mobile banking sector?

Mobile Device Management is a platform which is deployed to manage information security concerns generated within an organization’s ecosystem – employees, partners among others. It’s more internal rather than external.

The BFSI segment, which has been an early adopter, has seen many successful deployments simply because of the nature of the industry. The Industry deals with extremely sensitive information and has a large mobile workforce which needs to access this information through their mobile devices in order to enhance their own productivity and efficiency.  How is the shift towards unified endpoint management happening from legacy models?

The initial scope of MDM has primarily been around smartphone and tablets across multiple OS. Slowly however, the landscape of device management is changing. The lines between accessing information over desktop/laptops or smartphones and tablets are slowly blurring. The growth of smartphones and tablets has really taken CIOs by surprise. Many believed that information access would be restricted to the senior management and investing in related security tools wouldn’t be necessary.

In India however, the growth of smartphone and tablets has been exponential and enterprises are realizing that these tools are indirectly helping them enhance employee productivity and efficiencies. As a result of this and the BYOD phenomena, what has happened is that the desktop/laptop Vs smartphone/tablet balance is slowly being impacted.

We believe that unified endpoint management (UEM) platforms will take some more time to gain acceptance simply because most enterprises have already made significant investments in managing and securing the desktop/laptop infrastructure. It will be difficult to scrap these investments and go in for a UEM platform. What will be justifiable is an incremental investment in managing the mobile and tablet infrastructure that is slowly gaining prominence.

Tata Docomo makes it easy for enterprises to make this decision. The solution does not involve any upfront capital investment and is available on a cloud infrastructure thereby enabling a quick and hassle free deployment.