Even though enterprise mobility is maturing and evolving heading into 2015, there’s still no one-size-fits-all set of needs in the space. Thanks to differing business structures, industries, client needs, and more, different businesses have chosen to tackle enterprise mobility in a variety of ways.
In addition to offering a snapshot of enterprise mobility today, understanding these different types of enterprise mobility clients (and what type of enterprise mobility client you are) can help your business better recognize and address its needs for everything from mobility to security. To help frame that conversation, we thought we would take a minute to lay out a spectrum that covers most enterprises’ mobile needs today.
Based on our experience with clients and our conversations with other enterprises, here is a basic outline of the several different types of enterprise mobility clients:
- Completely inactive: Your business does nothing related to mobile apps at all. Enterprises that are completely inactive in the mobility space don’t really exist these days. (Or if they do, we haven’t seen one in a long time.) We’re including this more as a formality than anything, because nobody today truly does nothing in this space.
- BYOD only: Your business allows people to use devices to do things like access corporate email and use a mobile browser, and you may also offer a stipend to help offset data and voice charges.
- BYOD + public apps: The next type of enterprise mobility client is one that has a BYOD structure like the one outlined above, and in addition allows public apps for corporate use. Public apps may be free (Dropbox) or paid (OmniGraffle), and if they’re paid, you may use Apple’s Volume Purchase Program to pay for your employees’ apps.
- Modified web-based apps: Moving on up, your business has taken steps to run web-based apps on employee devices either as-is (which we don’t recommend) or repurposed as mobile-ready. Rather than building a suite of apps, you’ve taken web-based apps you already had around and adapted them to fit mobile.
- Limited private apps: Getting to the top of the spectrum, your business has developed a small number (1-5, give or take) of apps internally, and deployed them throughout the enterprise. This may be a hybrid app, a native app to run on various platforms, or any of the many solutions in between. Most important is that you’ve developed these apps internally.
- Full-scale private apps: Finally, we have the full-scale private app user, which, like the limited private app user, has developed apps internally. This final type of enterprise mobility client differs because of the number of apps they deploy; an enterprise that deploys dozens or hundreds of apps has different needs than one only deploying two.
One important thing to note here is that these enterprise mobility client types aren’t completely segmented out—this is a spectrum more than anything. It’s possible for a client to exist in more than one category, for example both BYOD and web-based apps. That said, these different categories are extremely useful in framing the security needs of different types of enterprise clients, which is exactly what we’ll be doing in the coming weeks.
Next week, we’ll give a rundown of different types of security profiles, and after that, we’ll wrap up our series with information on how to use your full client profile to evaluate a proper security solution. In the meantime, let us know where you fall on the enterprise mobility spectrum by reaching out in the comments or on Twitter!
