Telecommuting is slowly becoming a norm for today’s businesses. While the employee benefits from flexible work hours, improved productivity and better work-life balance, the employer benefits from easy and anytime reach to his employees, makes the distance between co-workers less significant. As the mobile work force population continues to grow in organizations, mobile IT administrators must be innovative enough and implement strategies that keep the employees happy and also yield productivity.
Here in this post, I have listed some recommended practices for mobile IT administrators that allow them to maintain control over all assets, increase employee productivity and support mobile workers efficiently and adequately.
- Enforce strong password policies on all devices. You may use an Mobile Device Management (MDM) solution to impose password policies and quarantine actions when the maximum number of password attempts has been crossed.
- Maintain visibility or control across all your devices and device applications.
- Ensure the healthy state of all your devices to avoid any malware infestations. Educate users (via emails, alerts or notifications) about the upcoming patches for different mobile operating systems and any mobile malwares doing the rounds. Encourage your users to install mobile anti-virus products to keep their devices away from any spams or Trojans.
- Ensure that no consumer apps or malicious apps are accessing any corporate data. Use a Mobile Application Management (MAM) solution to keep an eye on apps and their behavior. You can also set different rules such as enforcing access of corporate data only on secured tunnel.
- Keep an eye on any lost, stolen or damage devices. Using an MDM solution, you can set flags or notifications for any lost or stolen devices. If required, you may also define auto-quarantine actions.
- Identify rogue devices and restrict them to avoid any interference with corporate security.
- Ensure a 24×7 support for your mobile workers. They should have help available at disposal to avoid any business downtime.
- Encourage your team to create a sandbox for testing new technologies in different environments until they are deemed ready for the mobile workers.
As inferred, a mobile device management (MDM) is the back bone of your mobile workforce management solution. There are plenty of options available in the mobile device market for picking your choice of MDM solution. A typical MDM solution provides you a holistic view of all your corporate and non-corporate assets and provides you a single centralized console for viewing, managing and controlling your assets. You may pick a cloud based MDM solution or host an MDM solution in your premises.