Enterprises Have More Tools to Manage Mobile Devices

According to a new survey conducted by the Enterprise Device Alliance (EDA), organizations may be making progress in securing mobile devices.

The fourth annual survey, “EDA Mobile Survey," sought to understand how IT administrators are coping with the impact of smartphones and tablets on organizations. The survey indicates that securing corporate data on mobile devices and controlling access from devices to enterprise resources and data are the most important issues facing IT departments today. Leveraging established solutions such as MDM, organizations are now reporting progress in establishing and enforcing policies for mobile file management, configuration control and secure cloud-based solutions. Despite this, many organizations still consider security a challenge and are eager for thought leadership and tools to help lead the way.

Insights from the report include:

• 52% of organizations are implementing MDM solutions (up from 11% in 2011)
• More than 40% of organizations report they are constraining the use of mobile devices because of the difficulty in making them compliant with government and industry regulations
• Consumer cloud solutions are less favoured in the enterprise environment, prompting the rise in enterprise-managed alternative solutions
• 95% of organizations allow BYOD
• 20% of organizations use a version of CoPE (corporate-owned personally-enabled)
• 20% report that users are using unsecure, consumer file storage and sharing solutions
• More than 55% report they now provide a standard configuration of software for their mobile devices
• More than 36% require users to maintain 5 or more business passwords