Work-From-Home: Why MDM is Key to your Business

Ever since Work-From-Home jobs became a regular thing, mobile device management has become more and more of a necessary tool for businesses looking to reduce costs and keep their data secure. Hello and welcome back to our weekly blog post! In today’s entry, we’ll be discussing the many advantages of MDM that can apply to the current context of decentralized office work. Before we start today’s topic, and if you’re new to MDM, we’d like to invite you to find out more about the topic of Mobile Device Management from one of our previous entries by clicking this link. Alright, now let’s get back into today’s topic. Here are 4 reasons why we think MDM will be a must-have in 2022.

Stay Safe Anywhere

With the rise of work-from-home, many companies have started to move away from budgeting company-owned devices. After all, why spend money on cell phones when everybody already has their own? At first glance, the question might make a lot of sense, but once you start to really think about it, you’ll find that the answer is not as clean cut as it might seem initially. Let’s start with security. By not providing your employees with company owned devices, you’re leaving data security measures up to them, which means you could be putting your business’s valuable information at risk. This is because, generally speaking, keeping your data secure requires a lot of attention and constant oversight, since you need to make sure every device is just as secure as the next. This means verifying that every user uses company-approved apps, has the latest security updates installed as soon as they come out and stays clear of shady websites that can be used as an entry point for ransomware. To put it simply, unless you have a way to enforce security measures on every single one of your employee’s personal phones, you can’t fully guarantee your company’s data security. Even then, you might find that employees aren’t very willing to let their boss tell them what to do with their personal phones, especially if they’re working from home. As such, mobile device management can be a great tool to ensure that your company doesn’t fall victim to cyber-attacks or other unwanted intrusions, without overstepping into your worker’s privacy. It can help you to find threats and respond to them in real time, enforce security updates, set a limit on how many times a wrong password can be input before locking the phone, and it can also give you a greater oversight in all things security-related. Of course, there are many other perks of having an MDM tool at your disposal, but when it comes to securing your sensitive data, MDM tool can do wonders for you and your business.

Set The Standard

Another great advantage you can get from Mobile Device Management is software standardization. Devices that are centrally managed can provide improved productivity and data security by allowing you to have more control, such as deciding what apps are allowed and which aren’t. They also allow you to respond to security threats in real time, which can make a huge difference when an intrusion is detected. Standardized software also helps you to reduce costs in the long term, since software updates can be rolled out automatically on all devices at once without the need for additional support from external IT services. Furthermore, update automatization is great for security as well, because you no longer have to worry about having every employee having to do it themselves. As a result, you no longer have to worry about having a weak link hidden in one of your employee’s devices because MDM can take care of downloading every update as soon as it comes out, or whenever you decide to do it.

Stay in Control

Mobile Device Management is also useful to regulate data consumption to save money, especially now that work-from-home appears to be here to stay. By “whitelisting” or “blacklisting” certain apps, you can ensure that your company data is being used exclusively for work-related tasks. This feature is particularly relevant if your company issues devices despite the fact that most of the employees are working from home, since it’s harder to monitor what everybody is doing. Although we briefly mentioned privacy in our previous item, we think it’s a topic worth mentioning again, because the way your company handles the fine line between work and home is definitely important for your business and your employees. While company-owned devices can be quite the investment (like the 1,500 lines we talked about in previous entry), they also allow you to stay in control of your assets, be it data consumption, data security or even general productivity, without trespassing your workers’ privacy. This is a huge deal now that work from home is becoming common among many big companies. Nobody wants to have a personal phone that makes their owner feel like they’re being wiretapped by their boss. Now, if you don’t have a big budget to spend on a fleet of new phones, there are other alternatives to actually buying them, such as “Devices as a Service” programs or using web services that offer the features you need for less money, but that’s beside the point here. The main lesson here is that the less intrusive you are, the better it is for your employees to work with you, and MDM’s are the perfect tool to do exactly that.

Convenience For All

Lastly, we want to touch on convenience, both for business and employees. If you have already decided to rely on your worker’s equipment or you’re currently struggling with the transition to work-from-home, MDM can still be an awesome tool to make that transition seamlessly. Among the many advantages you get from Device Management, is lightning-fast deployment, which saves valuable time by pre-setting devices with your company apps already installed and user log-in information already filled in, without the hassle of forgotten passwords and complicated setups. By doing this, you’re not only saving money on additional IT support, but also making it easier for your employees to cope with these new dynamics.

In Summary

There’s no doubt that work from home is here to stay, so now it’s up to the businesses to adapt to this new format. Whether they do it or not, and how they do it, will have an important impact in their workforce. And while there are many other tools out there that can help your business transition seamlessly into this new era of decentralized work spaces, mobile device management is an evolving tool bound to improve over time.That’s all for this entry! However, if you’re interested in implementing Mobile Device Management in your business, or would like to find out more about Expertel and how we can help you save more money on your mobile or wireless expenses, free to get in touch with us by filling out the form you’ll find in this link to our contact page. We hope you found some useful information in today’s post, and we’ll see you in next week’s entry!