For the sixth consecutive year, IBM has been recognized as a Leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Mobility Management Suites.

In 2017, Gartner continues to define enterprise mobility management (EMM) suites across five core technologies, all of which are available through the following IBM MaaS360 with Watson cognitive unified endpoint management (UEM) solution editions:

• Mobile device management (MDM);
• Mobile application management (MAM);
• Mobile identity;
• Mobile content management (MCM); and
• Containment.

Download the 2017 Gartner Magic Quadrant for EMM

Each year, MaaS360 has placed as a Leader due to its completeness of vision and ability to execute, and it has gained recognition for its best-in-class software-as-a-service (SaaS) delivery model, strength in security and ease of use.

As Gartner exclaimed in this year’s report, “Customers have reported for several years that MaaS360 is easier to implement than many other EMM solutions.”

Looking to the future, we believe that MaaS360 will maintain its trajectory upward and to the right through innovation across key focus areas of cognitive and augmented intelligence, identity and access management (IAM), and UEM, including the Internet of Things (IoT).

MaaS360 Differentiates With Innovation in Cognitive

Gartner has identified MaaS360 Advisor, the EMM’s cognitive insights and contextual analytics solution, as “one of the most significant MaaS360 releases over the past year … a capability that combines Watson analytics with customer EMM data to help customers understand their mobile environment and make decisions” that save time, increase efficiency, and improve overall security and performance across their endpoints.

With Advisor, customers gain “useful insights regarding the state of the mobile environment. For example, the dashboard will identify policy violations and the associated vulnerabilities to which the organization is exposed.”

Gaining the unprecedented ability to see what happened, what can happen, and what should be done in response to risks and opportunities has already proven itself to be invaluable in managing endpoint and mobile environments. In recent weeks, Advisor helped customers identify the WannaCry ransomware attack, sharing information and steps to protect vulnerable devices.

IAM as a Foundational Element of MaaS360

IAM ensures that employees can gain quick, intuitive access to the enterprise apps they need for work on the go, whether through single sign-on (SSO) or multifactor authentication (MFA). It also upholds the security of the data contained therein by denying access to unrecognized or unmanaged devices.

Just as “Gartner recognizes [mobile identity] as a key capability of EMM,” MaaS360 correspondingly includes IAM as a solution within its Essentials edition, ensuring that every customer can provide the same level of productivity and protection across his or her devices.

With MaaS360 Identity Management, administrators can provide users with conditional SSO access to both native and cloud apps, seamlessly integrating with Active Directory (AD) and Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) to streamline the authorization process.

Taking a Device-Agnostic Approach

Smartphones and tablets are no less relevant for businesses than they were at their advent. The notable difference is that today’s users demand the same level of flexibility they’ve been granted on these devices across all other form factors, including laptops, desktops, wearables, ruggedized devices and even IoT.

Fast forwarding into the future, Gartner projected that “the diversity and number of devices will continue to grow, and IT organizations must be ready.”

To help customers stay on track, MaaS360 “continues to transition from an EMM strategy to a UEM one … offering one of the most feature-rich client management solutions” that includes support for Apple macOS and Microsoft Windows 7 through Windows 10.

As the Gartner report indicated, “EMM is quickly no longer meeting the requirements for organizations as client computing merges with mobile computing to form end-user computing groups.” By taking a device-agnostic approach, MaaS360 UEM administrators can finally shift their focus to the users, apps and content — the fuel behind the use cases for endpoint and mobile that are transforming businesses and, ultimately, impacting the bottom line.

Of course, a higher level of oversight and intelligence is needed to adequately manage and secure the endpoints, users, apps, content and data begotten from this technology convergence. Beyond determining which individuals or teams will keep track of it all, the larger problem is that no IT manager or team alone can keep up with the innumerable daily events — whether they are changes in compliance state, operating system (OS) releases, user activity or looming threats.

For this reason, MaaS360 has layered cognitive and augmented intelligence atop its UEM and IAM capabilities, giving customers the ability to make smarter, faster decisions about the endpoints in their environment.

Read the ‘2017 Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Mobility Management Report’ to Learn More

To learn more about MaaS360 and Gartner’s latest assessment of the EMM industry, download your complimentary copy of the “2017 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Mobility Management Suites.”

Download the Gartner Magic Quadrant for EMM

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