If you take a look at the BYOD conversation on the internet, you’ll find everyone agrees that the days of IT issuing corporate-owned devices to employees is coming to an end. Instead, organizations are allowing their employees to bring their own devices (where the term BYOD comes from) .

Many of us, working in companies that use IT, have had the experience of being dictated to, with respect to the hardware that can be used to do our jobs. Personal devices, be they laptops or mobile phones are often reject with the all to common excuse:

“sorry, you cannot use your own device, you have to use this one because it fully complies with our corporate policies”.

In order to satisfy the IT gatekeepers you will be issued a 2 year old, out of date, smart phone which you will have to carry in addition to your new Android or iOS device to get your job done.

Advantages of BYOD

The lack of security policies can compromise internal information and so, BYOD requires some organizational effort. In addition to reducing support costs and increasing user productivity, BYOD increases employee satisfaction as they can use the device that they choose. BYOD can come in two forms: Mobile Device Management (MDM) and Mobile Application Management (MAM). While MDM is there over the table, in my opinion it is not an option if we want employees to actually use their own devices for businness. As a little experiment our IT chief setted up a new policy in GMail compelling everyone to install some MDM feature. None accepted that, even when it implied not to see emails anymore.

It does not mean an organization must choose between one or the other, they are probably just complementary, and if we want to reach 100% of our employees, we will need to use both. As I draw it in my mind, in a simple way, MDM is related more with corporated-owned devices and MAM more with BYOD. Notice that MAM allows us also to manage situations where MDM is not possible or desired, such as contract workers and other unmanaged devices.

BYOD, MAM and MDM concepts are clear now but, how organizations get to succeed on BYOD?

BYOD Security. MAM

MAM (Mobile Application Management) allows organizations to focus their security efforts at the critical and actually important level, the app level. With MAM, IT can secure data at the application level, ensuring that business apps and data are safe and used strictly by whom and how the organization wants. All without interfering with other apps running on the device.

MAM and BYOD detractors usually remark that MAM increases development effort for organizations as every app requires unique coding to work with it and also that the availability of apps for a specific platform can be limited. But that, in my opinion, is not true. At Solid GEAR we have been working with Apperian, the industry pioneer of mobile application management, for 5 years now and therefore have a lot of experience in secure mobile app distribution. Apperian’s MAM platform protects mobile data at the app-level by applying security policies via app wrapping technology, allowing organizations to use their existing mobile apps without any additional development.

If you want to know more about Apperian’s MAM platform you can visit Apperian’s website and if you want to know more about Solid GEAR- Apperian’s alliance you can read our success case here