Perhaps the biggest driver for business advancement in the past decade has been the propagation of mobile devices in the workplace. The vast mobility uptake predominantly stems from bring-your-own-device (BYOD), a phenomenon that truly has the masses whistling while they work.

In the not-so-distant past, work began and ended at the desk. The mobile workers of today, enabled by IBM MaaS360, are out of pocket from dawn to dusk, multitasking from cutting-edge apps on the smartphones and tablets of their choice.

Now, moving beyond BYOD, the organizations that have caught the latest wave of mobility understand that it comes in different forms and flavors; it’s not just restricted to personal devices, but to corporate-issued and even shared devices. These devices run mission-critical applications, many times for specific use cases that are unique to individual companies and industries:

• Doctors and nurses are using tablets to get immediate access to patient healthcare records to make informed, life-saving decisions.
• Retailers are using smartphones on the floor as point-of-sale (POS) devices to scan bar codes, swipe credit cards and securely process transactions.
• Field services crews depend on mobile devices to pull down pertinent client data from the cloud anytime, anywhere to stay productive on the fly.
• Banks and credit unions are pivoting to secure data and uphold regulatory compliance with devices at the center of everyday financial exchanges.

The Massive Mobile Migration infographic, comprised of feedback from 200-plus survey respondents and real app data delivered from MaaS360, reveals that mobile is still the path of promise for the future of the enterprise — and there’s no slowing down.

Ambitions surrounding the enablement of a more flexible and productive workforce constituted the majority of those surveyed. A similar proportion confirmed that security concerns have hindered efforts to reap the full benefits of mobility. These same organizations can look to enterprise mobility management (EMM) platforms as a single, integrated technology solution that addresses all facets of a contemporary enterprise mobility strategy: achieve visibility, enable productivity and protect data across devices, apps, networks, cloud resources and data centers.

Moving Mountains With New Productivity Solutions

To avoid being left behind, enterprise IT must acknowledge that mobile is a productivity playmaker, and massive mobile adoption is a reality. It is rampant across all industries, positively impacting organizations of all types and sizes. The modern enterprise demands a platform that fully enables all hands on deck to tackle any unique mobile use case.

To meet the needs of all organizations and their new mobile workforce, MaaS360 has unveiled redesigned business productivity apps that are centered on usability, developed with the end user in mind:

• Simple, fast, powerful container solutions for secure business productivity;
• Reimagined app catalogs to effortlessly deliver enterprise mobile apps by the hundreds.

Locked-and-Loaded Mobile Productivity Containers

Managing masses of mobile workers can prove to be a huge challenge, especially when strategizing best practices for quick uptake and adoption of enterprise productivity resources — that is, if said resources lack a familiarized look and feel.

By taking a slick and simplified approach, MaaS360 accomplishes just that: offering a seamless way to switch between email, calendar, browser, chat and docs using newly released containers for Productivity Suite and Content Suite on Android and iOS.

Featuring a new user interface for both Android and iOS, users will find it much easier to bounce back and forth between processes to save time and stay on task. New swipe gestures have been added for more intuitive navigation and quicker actions. Better yet, sensitive data stays in one place. The passcode-protected, security-rich container remains completely separate from other applications on the user’s device, upholding end user privacy concerns and data leak prevention (DLP).

The Apps They Need, Delivered the Way They Want

With nearly 10 million app distributions and more than 100,000 apps managed across all customer app catalogs, MaaS360 has the brawn to support large-scale app deployments. Couple this with two new-look enterprise app catalogs for Android and iOS, and you’ve already put your app-doption woes in the rearview.

Users need to know where to go to find supported enterprise mobile apps that are catered to their job functions. They need the delivery method to be easy and appealing enough to make traction and gain momentum.

Each app store was built with the consumer in mind with a native look and feel, eliminating the learning curve and getting the masses right to work. Administrators are able to showcase featured apps, just like users experience with public app stores; bundles of apps can be created for functional areas like sales tools and categories of apps such as education and collaboration. Best of all, MaaS360 makes it easy for users to discover and download hundreds of applications from a single repository.

Who’s Afraid of the Big, Bad Mobile?

If the light side of mobile force is productivity, then the dark side is certainly security. And of today’s challenges pertaining to enterprise mobility, one of the most formidable is data security. Even large, successful, forward-thinking organizations continue to grapple with securing disruptive mobile technology that continually possesses, sends and receives critical business and customer data.

The biggest question for enterprise IT remains: How do you make mobile work easier, faster and more efficient while ensuring total data protection across users, devices, apps, the network and cloud? The balancing act continues to grow in difficulty for CISOs and CIOs who lack the know-how and resources to manage it all.

Tightly integrated with industry-leading security offerings, MaaS360 brings enterprise IT the intelligence and capabilities needed to embrace large-scale mobility and its advantages without the associated complexity and headaches:

• Secure access to enterprise apps and resources via smartphones and tablets;
• Visualize all mobile actions and out-of-compliance events from a single dashboard;
• Detect ongoing user and app activity to protect against cloud threats.

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Forecasting Safe and Secure Mobile Cloud Access

Quick, easy, on-the-go access to enterprise resources such as software-as-a-service (SaaS), mobile and Web applications is a major driver for mobile productivity. IT has come to expect consistent, high demand for apps such as Office 365, Google Apps, Salesforce, Workday and ServiceNow, all at a moment’s notice.

The breadth and depth of cloud service options has created a significant need for CISOs to monitor how their many mobile users select, access and interact with each cloud application. Not all apps are created equal; protecting against unauthorized or unsafe applications is a top concern.

MaaS360 integration with IBM Security Access Manager (ISAM) grants mobile users single sign-on (SSO) access to these resources so long as they’ve enrolled, authenticated and are in compliance with company-mandated policies. The MaaS360-ISAM integration answers the call for enterprise-grade data protection while granting trusted users trusted access to the right resources.

Keeping Pertinent Mobile Infractions Under Your Thumb

Large mobile environments are rampant with activity. When it comes to threat identification, an ample response at the flip of a switch is everything. IT can’t be burdened with zeroing in on each individual event; they need a way to effortlessly sniff out out-of-compliance occurrences the moment they happen.

MaaS360 is the first EMM platform to feature an app on the IBM Security App Exchange. The App Exchange app gives enterprise IT a way to view critical mobile information in an easily digestible format, providing the necessary context and resources to respond instead of getting the information they needed too late.

IT can quickly sift through massive amounts of data from over 400 data sources — including event info from identity and access management and network access control systems — all of which feed into the IBM QRadar platform. The result is quick identification and mitigation of mobile security risks such as malware infection, data leakage and use of unauthorized apps that would otherwise go undetected.

Managing the Mobile Masses With MaaS360

Available to try through a full-production, 30-day free trial, MaaS360 provides IT teams a wide range of mobile security options to separate corporate and personal information across users, devices, content and apps. This gives customers the flexibility to offer tiered or layered mobile security to address their varied end user needs and IT security requirements such as essential mobile device management, data containment, app security, mobile threat management, unified endpoint management and advanced control of corporate data for specific use cases.