Mobile Device Management: Time To Get Started
As mobile devices become more prevalent and deeply ingrained in employees' work lives, the question of how to deploy, secure, and manage them has become an increasingly pressing problem for enterprise IT departments. After a long period of limited penetration, characterized mostly by executives and professionals carrying BlackBerrys, the usage patterns of mobile devices—most of them equipped with corporate email-access and many with capabilities to run proprietary business applications—have changed dramatically.
Today, powerful mobile devices—high-end cell phones, smartphones, ultra-mobile PCs, and so on—are as likely to be found in the hands of field technicians, mobile salespeople, and mid-level managers as they are C-level executives. As the power and connectivity of mobile devices surge, their numbers are exploding: research firm IDC predicts that sales of enterprise "converged mobile devices" (smartphones, UMPCs, and the like) will reach 63 million units worldwide by 2010, up from 7.3 million in 2005. The growth in the number of BlackBerry devices from Research In Motion gives an idea of the wider market demand: up from less than five million two years ago to more than 14 million BlackBerry subscribers worldwide.
But companies' ability to manage these devices as corporate assets, including controlling the data and applications that run on them, has not kept pace.
Based on a survey of more than 300 IT managers, this report examines the needs and attitudes of enterprise IT departments around the procurement, deployment, securing, and provisioning of mobile devices. It provides insight into many of the questions facing IT managers today, as well as baselines for constructing a mobile device management strategy and choosing a solution.
Among the survey's key findings:
- Converged mobile devices, such as smartphones, have a long way to go to fully penetrate the enterprise market. More than three-quarters of the respondents say that less than half of their employees use such devices.
- Most organizations have not adopted mobile device management strategies--nor do they plan to do so. Nearly 52% say they don't plan to adopt such a solution.
- Nevertheless, spending on MDM technology will rise in 2008. In fact, 53% of respondents said they plan to increase device-management spending in the next 12 months.
- The primary factor driving the adoption of mobile device management solutions is security. Password protection, remote wipe capability, and physical device tracking are the top three factors cited by companies that have adopted or plan to adopt MDM systems.
- The primary factors preventing IT managers from adopting or considering such mobile management systems are cost, complexity, and lack of perceived need.
 Download Report, underwritten for a limited time by Microsoft Windows Mobile. The information submitted above is collected by both Microsoft and TechWeb.
Download report here
Richard Martin is an editor at large for InformationWeek and an authority on the U.S. mobile and wireless industry. He appears frequently as a speaker and panelist at industry conferences, including CTIA Wireless and Interop. He has been a contributor to Wired and Energy Tribune, and his work has appeared in Time, The Atlantic Monthly, The Asian Wall Street Journal, and other publications. His feature story "The God Particle and the Grid" (Wired, April 2004) was selected for Best Science Writing of 2004. He is also a veteran writer and analyst on Asian affairs and the energy industry. In 1993-94 he was a visiting scholar at the University of Hong Kong, and in 1998 spent six weeks in Central Asia reporting on the Caspian Sea oil boom for MSNBC and other news media outlets.
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