As Mobile World Congress kicks off, IT professionals, executives and thought leaders are set to network and gain valuable insights surrounding mobile, its latest advancements and the many ways it is transforming today’s businesses.

The annual event affords participants who are often bogged down by the mobile minutiae an opportunity to pause and consider the question, “How well does my organization manage and secure mobile devices, apps and data relative to others like us?”

Key Findings From Mobile Metrics

To make it easy for you, we’ve gleaned some nuggets from our newly released Mobile Metrics to help you learn and share. These cloud-sourced benchmarks are delivered directly from IBM MaaS360, providing up-to-date, reliable facts and figures generated from real organizations just like yours.

Watch the on-demand webinar: See How You Measure Up With MaaS360 Mobile Metrics

Bigger Companies, Bolstered Policies

Did you know that larger organizations that have enrolled more than 250 devices have more robust and complex policy definitions? Thirty-two percent have more than three iOS policy sets and 17 percent have more than three for Android, compared to 8 percent and 3 percent, respectively, across smaller organizations with 250 devices or fewer deployed.

This is largely due to the difference in mobile maturity across each of these deployment sizes. Larger customers are more likely to have multiple, diverse user groups with unique needs and use cases for mobile, hence the need for custom policies that are catered to each group’s requirements.

As your mobile environment expands, make sure to evaluate how devices and apps are being used by different teams and departments. Then you can tweak or add new policies on an ongoing basis to meet current demands.

Quick tip: MaaS360 policy inheritance makes it easy to build from existing configurations, affording the customization you require while eliminating manual copy-and-paste processes. However, don’t make the mistake of creating so many policies that management becomes a nightmare.

We find that larger companies need more policies, but try to keep them under a baker’s dozen. If you could use a helping hand, our no-charge Mobile Security and Productivity Workshops are available to keep your policies in line with your goals with mobility.

When One Device Is More Than Enough

As far as devices go, in which industry would you suspect it’s least common to have multiple devices across different users?

In turns out that less than one-tenth of MaaS360 users across the public sector have more than one device that they use for work (9 percent). Conversely, in the health care industry, about 1 in 5 users has two devices (21 percent).

Why? Although reasons behind these metrics can vary on a case-by-case basis, government employees are often issued devices directly from their employer and are required to adhere to strict usage standards. In health care, bring-your-own-device (BYOD) policies and shared device support is more common.

At These Places, the App Is the Entrée

If you were asked to list out the most app-happy industries, what would be in your top three?

We discovered that services, education and financial services rely on them the most. Each of these sectors average 25 or more apps per device across the majority of their devices:

• 54 percent for services;
• 52 percent for education; and
• 51 percent for financial services.

No matter what industry you might find yourself in, apps are sure to be prevalent and will play an active role in reshaping the way your business operates. Using Mobile Metrics, it’s easy to see which apps are most commonly blacklisted and whitelisted, so be sure to check in frequently and adjust your mobile application management (MAM) policies to account for the new apps arriving on the scene.

In our recent webinar, “See How You Measure Up With MaaS360 Mobile Metrics,” our experts outlined best practices for using the tool and revealed more interesting insights and benchmarks we’ve uncovered since its release.

Compare Your Company With the Mobile Security Index

You may be wondering how your organization compares to the rest of the pack when it comes to security. Using the Mobile Security Index, a new MaaS360 offering available for free to the public, you can chalk yourself up to others in your industry — receiving scores for device, app, data, network and overall security — just by completing a quick self-assessment. As with Mobile Metrics, the Mobile Security Index generates your scores using real-world usage data from millions of devices managed by companies with MaaS360.

Mobile Metrics will soon be enhanced with a new Security tab that will make it possible for you to benchmark your organization’s security across these same categories directly from the MaaS360 platform.

Visit the IBM Mobile Security Index