Before we even begin, let’s start with this as fact; email IS corporate sensitive information.  Not buying it?  What if you were visiting a perspective client who you knew was also looking at your competition.  A person working at the client happens to be a friend of one of the competitors (or is getting paid).  You set your mobile device down and this person swipes it.  You would probably think you lost it.  Would you feel comfortable with your competitor looking at your emails or your calendar?  What if it was one of your employees who loses a phone at a bar?

That’s just email.  What if you have applications with mobile databases on the device?  Financial statements?  Company documents?  The list goes on and on.  It is easy to see how sensitive that device becomes and the increasing need to manage it.  With that in mind, we lead into mobility management.

As far as I am concerned, mobility management – if you look at it holistically – includes:

• Requirements assessment
• Business and IT policy creation
• Device procurement…which ties into
• Device provisioning…which ties into
• Device management…which ties into
• (Custom) Application development…which ties into
• Application management
• Service management
• Security management
• Expense management
• End-user support
• Help Desk / Remote Access
• Device replacement
• Data back up

This sounds like a lot, and it is.  Depending on the size of your company and the nature of the data, some of these items are unnecessary.  The point is that handing an unmanaged phone to an employee and allowing them to access corporate data is not very secure.  You would not allow that kind of access with a PC.

Let’s revisit our scenario from above.  Did you know, if your company uses a Microsoft Exchange Server for email, that you can wipe out all of the data on your device from your Outlook Web Access system?  This is device management.  Did you know that you can require a PIN to be entered whenever you phone “wakes up” so only you could look into the phone?  This is security management.

We have only touched the surface.  In future blogs, we will explore these items individually and judge the impact each has on your business.  At the end of the day, companies need to find a balance in terms of how they support devices.  They have to make a decision around what extent they will cover and support the devices and service.  There’s no right answer and there’s no wrong answer (except having no answer at all).