Authored by Ivan Cantero, Product Professional Services for IBM Security.

Retail is always a sector with specific difficulties and challenges, and enterprise mobility management (EMM) is another field that IT departments of retail companies have to consider. Besides bring-your-own-device (BYOD) and corporate phones, retail organizations are starting to leverage other technologies such as tablets with access to corporate Wi-Fi networks.

The result is a complex environment with very different devices and operating systems, which IT departments have to control, secure and make compliant. At the same time, they want to provide access to corporate resources for employees on those devices, no matter where they are located, to improve efficiency.

Answering Tough Questions About Enterprise Mobility

If you want to provide access to corporate resources, internal files, confidential data, internal apps or corporate mail to a broad variety of devices, shouldn’t you first secure those devices and ensure their compliance with corporate policies before allowing access? Would you impose the same security policies and restrictions on devices owned by the corporation as on personal devices? What about location tracking? Would you track employees on their personal devices or just on corporate-owned devices? Is there any law in place that applies to this type of tracking? If one of these devices is stolen, wouldn’t it be a good idea to remove corporate data?

These are the often difficult questions that have to be discussed between several different stakeholders and departments within a company. Once you have answered these questions, defined your security policies and identified corporate resources to which you want to provide access from outside of your network, you will need a solution to help you apply those EMM rules.

Enabling Enterprise Mobility in Retail

With a solution like IBM MaaS360, you will be able to brand your environment and customize the user experience. If you want to isolate the corporate side from the personal side of the device and avoid data leakage, you can leverage container technology.

Your security department might be worried about threats. MaaS360 and its integrated mobile threat prevention solution can be enabled right out of the box. With Trusteer integration, your environment will become more secure instantly.

IT asset management will be glad to hear that mobile device management tools can report a complete hardware and software inventory of the mobile environment. IT professionals will gain control of devices and take immediate action to remove corporate data from a stolen device, send a message to a user, deploy an app and more.

For those of you attending InterConnect 2017 in Las Vegas, the session “How El Corte Inglés Secures BYOD and Shared Devices in Retail” will include details about implementing EMM in a retail environment.