Enterprise Mobility Simplified: Microsoft Style

Mobility is certainly the flavour of the season and has become quite mature already. In lieu of this, it is extremely important for CIOs to ensure that kick-starting a mobility initiative within the enterprise must have clear levels of productivity and must have a direct impact on end user processes.

This is, in fact, the only way to easily justify an initiative of sorts.

What’s got CIOs even more stumped is the fact that now there are not just one or two, but three major mobile operating systems. It remains to be seen who emerges as the clear winner, and at this point of time, it doesn’t really matter. The important thing is that CIOs need to understand how to utilise the concept of the marketplace app to take enterprise apps and the enterprise marketplace to the next level.

Developing enterprise-specific apps can go along way in boosting the end users’ productivity in addition to allowing them to access enterprise data from absolutely anywhere with a telecom operator.

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Another thing that is important is how easy the OS vendor makes it for the CIOs to deploy apps from an enterprise perspective.

Building an employee mobility strategy can be extremely beneficial for end users. Giving employees the ability to work any time any where, faster decision-making and capturing data from the field for use in analytics are just a few.

With the introduction of Windows 8, there is certainly a sense of integration that comes with it. CIOs today have access to a secure, familiar platform with features such as flexible application distribution, integrated device management – that only make things better for technology teams. In addition to this, CIOs now have the ability to create their own enterprise specific marketplace, easily set up with the support of a service cloud. Microsoft’s System Center now allows CIOs to set up a small cloud quite easily to serve enterprise mobility needs.

Secure deployment and policy management surely makes life a breeze. Also, in addition to this, CIOs now have complete control on the marketplace, individual device policies and application lifecycles.

A very interesting component of Microsoft’s mobile development platform is the security that comes packaged in. For example, users have control on whether they want to accept new enterprise applications, or application updates. This is a provision to ensure that in any instance, no malware is being pushed to the phone.
Additionally, one great feature that will excite CIOs and their teams alike is the fact that applications can be applied with respect to user roles. In this scenario, if a new employee of the company is defined to have a certain role, the phone will automatically start to download the required applications from the cloud itself.

From the security perspective, it’s great to see that enterprise data and personal data are stored separately. So even if an employee is leaving the enterprise for example, his or her personal data remains untouched while the enterprise data can be wiped out from the system.

As far as the building environment goes, Microsoft is making sure that the developers have it easy. In a typical application development scenario, all one needs to do is sign up with the Microsoft Dev Center as a company.

In case CIOs want to build their own enterprise marketplace, users are required to get a security token validated from security vendor Symantec. Once the token is validated, users can start developing their applications and put them right into the cloud for adoption. And that’s all it takes!

Simplifying the development ecosystem is a great move on Microsoft’s part. Given its massive enterprise adoption, it becomes even more important to build an ecosystem that simplifies enterprise mobility, especially when this aspect of enterprise architecture is something that has been confusing for many.