Opportunities for mobile service providers: MDM-as-a-service

At the end of March 2012, Orange UK announced the launch of its ‘Secure Mobility’ proposition, a bundle of a Mobile Device Management (MDM) service (using MobileIron’s platform) with its own data VPN service. Orange joins a number of other mobile operators, including AT&T, Swisscom, Verizon Wireless and Vodafone Global Enterprise that have started offering MDM-as-a-Service as part of their managed mobility portfolios over the past year or so (all of these operators use MobileIron, but many other MDM platform providers exist – see box).

The arguments for organisations to use MDM software to support functionality such as remote data wipe and lock, policy enforcement, over-the-air (OTA) device management and application sandboxing across employer- and employee-owned devices are familiar:

• Data security. This has always been an issue for businesses: long before the rise of smartphones, tablets and ubiquitous wireless connectivity, employees took work home. Corporate information, whether held on paper or electronic media, has always been mobile beyond the physical boundaries of the office. But the proliferation of highly connected devices with high storage capacities has magnified the extent, and therefore the security risks to businesses of this kind of data mobility. When not provisioned with work laptops, employees will email files to themselves to work on at home when before they might have taken home physical print-outs. Those that are technically savvy set up their own devices to access corporate data even in the absence of official 'bring your own device' (BYOD) policies to access data at any time. Because more data is now more easily transportable and transmissible than ever before, minimising and managing the risks of data mobility is an ever-growing concern for many businesses.
• The need to support multiple mobile OS platforms. Even without considering employee-owned devices, rapid technology change has left many firms needing to support two or more separate mobile platforms even for employer-provisioned equipment. For example, in many firms while existing Blackberry devices continue to be used on existing contracts, newer, or more senior employees, are provisioned with iPhones or, increasingly, Android smartphones. As a result multiple different mobile smartphone operating systems co-exist within the business.
• Productivity gains. For many years businesses have been keen to equip knowledge workers, field workers and sales staff with kit that will enable them to be more productive when on the road. Easily estimated (though less easily proven), such productivity arguments continue to drive deployments of connected devices including laptops, tablets and smartphones.

AT&T, Orange, Swisscom, Verizon Wireless and Vodafone Global Enterprise are, at the moment, largely aiming their MDM offerings at the high-end corporate market – in particular targeting large organisations with thousands of employees, and in sectors with particular sensitivities around data security such as financial and legal services. Companies such as Virtela (using MobileIron's Connected Cloud platform) and Fiberlink (with its own MaaS360 platform) are beginning to offer cloud MDM platforms that promise a lower cost of entry (because the purchase of server equipment and upfront licence fees is not required). This makes their services accessible to smaller organisations (although these suppliers are also targeting larger organisations too).

MDM solutions for varying sizes of company

Smaller and medium-sized businesses face a number of similar issues to those faced by large multi-site corporates: around data security, the need or desire to be able to support different mobile OS platforms, and wanting to use ICT to drive productivity – they just have smaller budgets. As MDM platforms, and the underlying mobile OS's, mature to be able to support the range of functionality that businesses require, MDM offered as a service promises a way to extend the market for MDM platforms beyond the corporate.

Mid-market and smaller business without the financial or technical resources – or operational bandwidth – to support their own MDM deployments, but with a business need, can be better addressed with appropriately-priced service offerings. And this is a service proposition that mobile operators and those service providers that are geared to serve medium and small-sized businesses are well placed to offer.

This article is an excerpt from a forthcoming Innovation Observatory report on Enterprise Mobility. For more information, contact us.