Businesses face a number of challenges when it comes to software and application deployment, says Paulo Ferreira, head of Enterprise Mobility at Samsung Electronics South Africa.
As employees start bringing their own mobile devices into the corporate environment, the risk to corporate data increases and the management of personal and private information becomes more of an issue.
With these increases in mobility, each vertical sector has unique requirements when it comes to how software and applications add value based on what the IT workload, criteria, and objectives of the organisation are. Companies therefore need to be in a position to distribute and manage enterprise applications more efficiently.
One of the strategies to do so involves the implementation of an internal application store that can meet the specific enterprise requirements. However, it is not as easy as just establishing a platform and hoping for the best.
Just as is the case with any enterprise implementation, security needs to be an integral layer in helping distribute and manage applications to any vertical sector. IT managers need to more easily control the application lifecycle, from installation and updates to deletion.
From their side, employees and partners using the enterprise app store know that the task-related applications that they download to their mobile devices are approved for use and updated as required with little or no intervention needed from their side.
An effective way for IT managers to accomplish this mobile application management and distribution security and effectively is through a Web console. This gives them control over which employees use specific applications by managing groups of authorised users. The IT department can then remotely push applications to a group, as well as install, update, and remove those applications without user intervention.
Moreover, IT managers can set business policies and permissions at the group level and restrict application use to members of selected groups only. In this environment, they can also bundle applications, select target categories, change application availability status, and monitor application store usage statistics.
Ultimately, this will enable employees to download applications that can perform business tasks from an enterprise application store with less worry about potential security and legal issues. IT managers can also monitor employee installation of unsecured applications.
Given the importance that is placed on mobile applications, businesses will become more competitive by empowering their employees with the right mobile tools to fulfil their specific tasks while still prioritising security and productivity.