Manage all your employees’ devices in one place with MDM

Back in the old days, when employees relied exclusively on desktop PCs for completing their everyday work tasks, it was much easier for corporate IT offices to provide oversight. Basic device management tools were enough to keep an eye on people’s machines and know what they were up to. In today’s era of rapid workplace modernization, however, things are a little different. Modern professionals are constantly shifting gears, jumping from desktops to laptops to tablets to smartphones all the time. Sometimes, they’re even tapping into the Internet of Things.

So how can you manage all of that?

One solution is to invest in Mobile Device Management (MDM) technology. MDM represents a new way of managing IT – it’s a strategy that involves taking all your devices and managing them centrally from a single console.

It sounds like a can’t-miss idea, and yet there are still a lot of companies that have been sluggish to get on board with the trend. According to Chris Silva, an analyst at Gartner, many companies are still struggling to adopt one unified platform for managing all their employees’ devices.

“If you look at the average organization, are they doing this? Not yet,” Silva said in an interview with TechTarget. “The bigger the organization, the more complex the process is.”

Moving to a centralized model can be a difficult transition for some companies due to the need to re-skill resources and add capabilities and new tools, but it’s absolutely worth doing to reduce device management costs and fortify their security footprint. For organizations that don’t take that step, there are often too many disparate aspects of IT to manage all at once, such as…

• Mobile device inventory: Are you keeping an eye on all of your employees’ tablets and smartphones? Can you remotely wipe their devices in case they’re lost or stolen?
• Mobile applications and security: How are you keeping your devices secure? Are you able to centrally push applications to your employees and respond to requests for new licenses?
• OS configuration management: Are you to manage personas and set policies based on user types? Can you segment your employees and set customized policies for each group?
• Identity/access management: How are your people logging on to your networks and accessing their data? Are there are any issues to address with authentication, authorization, passwords, or anything else of that nature?

Before MDM technology, you’d be stuck managing all four of these areas separately; now, you don’t have to. And in Zones, you have a business partner that can get you up to speed with this technology in no time at all. Your employees are rapidly embracing modern technology, so you’ll want to have the right management tools to stay on top of it all. Allow us to leverage our partnerships to deliver a solution which works best in your environment.

Helping you adopt a mobile strategy is just one of the many things we can do for your business in the realm of Workplace Modernization. Dig deeper into our site, and you’ll find many others.

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