Enterprise Cellular-IoT Challenges – How to manage

Executive Summary

Wireless connection is becoming a default option for connected everything. Cellular-IoT is becoming part of company products and services. Multi-MNO support is even more crucial in these use-cases and cost of MNO support problems will be even higher. Enterprise Edge solution with multi-MNO support is a good solution to solve these problems. Decision makers need to evaluate, build and deploy solution after very careful planning and assessment phase in which consultants can be used to help create IoT solution which meets requirements and flexibility to evolve as technology evolves rapidly. After IoT-project evaluation and planning is complete, Enterprise should execute on project implementation and operational phases with well-defined deliverable and operational efficiency.

Introduction

Although much media attention is focused on consumer products, some of the most exciting IoT innovations have occurred within the business sector, where the combination of sensor data and sophisticated analytical algorithms have allowed companies to streamline business processes, increase productivity, and develop leading-edge products. IoT faces much uncertainty related to regulatory developments, customer demand, and technological advances. For enterprise IoT, many questions also remain about its utility and impact, since most companies are still in the early stages of implementation. To date, they have only achieved modest, incremental benefits from their enterprise IoT programs.

Enterprise IoT could produce the greatest benefits in manufacturing and service operations

For service operations, respondents believed that enterprise IoT would produce the most value in three areas: diagnostics and prognostics, predictive maintenance, and monitoring and inspection. In manufacturing, the top use cases were resource and process optimization (for instance, improving yield, throughput, or energy consumption), asset utilization, and quality management. Telematics is another market that is evolving very fast to add more and more functionality using cellular-IoT and try to build multi-MNO solution.  Wearables are adding cellular connectivity. Refer to another article – Ten steps of adding LTE to a Wearablewhich outlines challenges of adding cellular connectivity and MNO-relationship aspects.  Mistakes in managing MNO-relationship can prove to be costly as this affects customer experience and device returns as faulty device even when device is working correctly and problem is in device-activation for cellular connection.

In next 5 years, every person in developed counties (including USA) will be using at-least 5 to 8 cellular-IoT devices in their car, wearables, home security, home automation and predictive maintenance type use-cases.  Growth is explosive with technology evolving very fast. Hence, experts help should be used to avoid costly mistakes in new device launches.  Enterprise is best advised to add consulting experts as part of their team to make sure cellular-IoT lifecycles issues are properly covered at product strategy, planning, implementation and operational stages of products.

Cellular-IoT Strategy and Planning

Enterprise Wireless should ideally be approached at the drawing board with a forward-thinking, well-educated and robust strategy that aligns with the fundamental goals of the entire business.

While this in itself is a challenge for Enterprise leaders, they must ensure that the senior executives of the organization are fully bought-in to their mobile strategy, and that there is a positive mind-set towards the transformative nature of such technologies upheld throughout.

Beyond these core aspects of introducing mobility into an organization, the strategic vision also needs to answer the diverse range of questions presented by such a fragmented and vast marketplace which is constantly evolving.

Enterprise faces many cellular-IoT issues while adding it as part of Enterprise IoT solution and products. Some of the Enterprise Cellular-IoT issues are as follows:

  • Device on-boarding for cellular-IoT as different MNOs have different device on-boarding processes
  • Device-activation issues (and associated customer returns)
  • How to maintain Enterprise Security for traffic going across MNO
  • Avoid dependence of one MNO and ability to use multiple MNO options
  • Optimize roaming cost
  • Subscription Management to adapt to local country or region
  • Deal with MNOs based on device location country / area of installation / usage
  • Fraud, Misuse of cellular-IoT devices, High unexplained subscriber traffic
  • Direct connection from Enterprise to MNO
  • AI, Analytics
  • MNO relationship management

Alot of these issues are beyond the scope of what a single MNO can solve and often Enterprise does not have the skills to manage it on their own. Most MNOs want exclusive relationship with an Enterprise which is not a desirable long-term strategic option for Enterprise. So how to bridge this enterprise-MNO relationship gap to make everyone happy?

One option to bridge the Enterprise to MNO gap is to use Managed MNO Services to manage Enterprise to MNO relationship and development of multi-MNO solution. Many industry verticals require special solutions which are not available from MNOs for their cellular-IoT requirements. For example- eSIM technology was created by Telematics Industry (as a whole) partnering with GSMA to solve MNO-mobility issues as vehicles change ownership or country of usage.

To navigate these challenging processes and essentially reach the strategic goals that Enterprise-IoT should be pointing towards, enterprises should seek help and guidance from experienced partners and solution providers when devising their mobile strategies, and trust the expertise at their disposal.

IoT Security

IoT Security is extremely important. Without IoT security, Solution will not be deployed regardless of business value that it creates. IoT security framework needs to be considered as an end-to-end solution which makes sure that no vulnerable access or link can be exploited. Security must be designed in a way that system usability is not compromised. This is not an east art to master. Many people look at security only for the pieces that they are responsible for and not contribute actively for overall security. Security is a collaborative and team effort from special people who focus on security aspect only. In some cases, over engineering is done in the name of security without considering the need of it and grows cost of project. So, this is a balancing act as well.

One example of IoT security worth considering is – Hackers who try to move sim-card out of device (thing such as utility meter or vending machine)  and use it for illegal purpose.  Detection of fraud at the end of month could be too late for fraud cases because Enterprise is liable for all the traffic & it may be too late to act on SIM-cards & subscriptions that are used in fraud. It is desirable to get “near” real-time traffic feedback of such hacking activity to stop it in a timely manner without incurring huge-cost which is a pass-through from MNO perspective.

Other IoT security example – Hacker network may try to act like MNO to try and connect to device and extract data. Creating a hacker network locally is becoming easier by the day. 3GPP and other standards forum try to plug security holes. However, for high value targets, high-value hacker option is not impossible.

Enterprise Edge connected directly to MNO-network provides additional mobile security as connection via Internet is avoided.  With SD-WAN connections being available, direct connection from Enterprise to MNO has become a lot easier. Some MNOs offer additional Enterprise Private Network services for directly connected Enterprise which can be of great help in keeping Enterprise-traffic completely private.

No solution is completely fool-proof. The best option for security is to design it in a way that it is hard for attacker to attack at very high cost and security solution is dynamic enough to detect and eliminate any attack in a timely manner. Also, continuous security monitoring and update is necessary to keep solution up-to-date and stay ahead in this cat & mouse game.

Enterprise Edge + Cloud

Edge Compute is an essential part of architecture and design that is needed to enable scalable architecture for massive IoT deployment or when data generated from IoT device is significantly large or time-sensitive for processing.

MNOs are also deploying Edge Compute Infrastructure for similar reasons.  Public Cloud vendors are also adding Edge Compute Infrastructure as part of their product offering. Every market maker is pitching their edge-compute Infrastructure option to be the best option for Enterprise.  However, no one has a proven solution yet and market is evolving rapidly. Edge Client-support is needed for MNO-based Edge-Compute to enable smooth separation between Edge-Compute functions and Core-Network functions. For this reason alone, Edge-support for Smartphone / user-devices may evolve differently from Edge-support for IoT devices.

In our view, Enterprise should take a step-back and evaluate option at long-term strategic level.  Edge-Compute requirements can be analyzed for two different Enterprise use-case categories:

  • IoT added as part of company products in an industry vertical such as smart-industry, home-security, Telematics / transport, Drones & Wearables
  • Enterprise branch office Edge-Compute Solution hosting devices from multiple vendors

Enterprise strategy, requirements and architecture shall be vastly different for two use-cases categories identified above.

Most IoT enabled products are proprietary and there is very little focus on creating industry standards. Most of the products using IoT today are consumer products by large market makers such as Apple, Samsung and others who have the market power to push proprietary solution to replicate Apple’s success with smartphones. For Telematics and Drones, MNO traffic management and device management creates challenging issues. MNOs want exclusive relationship for many of these vertical market players as each car manufacturer (for example) can potentially add several million customers for each MNO. In our view, as a long-term strategy, Telematics industry businesses should invest heavily in creating a multi-MNO solution at continent-scale and hire mobile consultants (like us) to build a mobile center of excellence as their strategic product differentiation asset. Similarly, Drones and other industry verticals can be analyzed separately as each of these use-cases are unique. Each vertical market shall evolve separately and each market is going to grow significantly in future. Mobilestack can offer expertise in development of Edge Compute solution for our clients at strategic, planning, implementation and operational level to help Enterprise develop such solutions.

For second use-case, Enterprise will use multiple vendors as part of Multi-Tenant Edge Compute within building or local geographic area. A good example of this is hospitals. Integration of several proprietary solutions will be hard and make market penetration of such products very low. Again, Health care-industry level efforts are needed to develop an edge-compute infrastructure which is application-vendor neural, open and secure. This will also require industry-standards and open-source solutions that can be used as part of Edge-Compute infrastructure. Industry forum is required to drive such objectives. Effort is needed to develop such solutions asap. This problem is too big for any Enterprise to solve.

Cloud providers are trying to solve this in their own proprietary manner to specifically grow their own Cloud business. In our view, some big Enterprise should work together to create MNO-neutral and Cloud service provider (CSP)-neutral platform which can allow deployment of multi-tenant applicants from different vendors. The good news is that MNOs want a similar platform available at bigger scale for their own solution. Open Source forums are also striving for similar goals. It is early stage for these solutions. Active participation of Enterprise customers is needed to steer these solutions in the right direction.

To mitigate Fraud risks, Enterprise needs to monitor & analyze “traffic usage pattern” as most operators do consolidated billing across all Enterprise subscribers on a monthly basis.  Enterprise-Edge can play a huge role in providing near real-time traffic analysis on a per subscription basis to identify fraud in a timely manner and save operational cost.

Multi-MNO Solution – Pros & Cons

No MNO wants Enterprise to develop Multi-MNO solution. What does the Enterprise want? Not many Enterprise stake-holders have clarity on this. In our view, a lot depends on business and scale of IoT devices that are going to be deployed. For small-cap or mid-cap businesses developing IoT solution, access to a consolidator type solution is beneficial and developed as community with the help of mobile experts like Mobilestack Inc. VCs need to consider investments in such options after community requirements and business case is established.

For large cap businesses developing IoT based products or services, development of multi-MNO global solution should be part of strategically important. Telematics manufactures is a very big example to learn from.  Car manufacturers (such as GM and Ford) have been using cellular-IoT in a car as part of safety security diagnostics (SSD) solution for many years and there are many lessons that can be learnt from these experiences.

Many MNOs are developing global connectivity solutions to cater to these large Enterprise requirements in the hope of getting exclusive relationship from large cap businesses. MNOs are also willing to offer deep discounts to make get exclusive contracts and weaken Enterprise business cases for development of multi-MNO solution.

Multi-MNO solution has many advantages for large / Global IoT deployments. Long term cost advantages, future proof solution, ability to overcome MNO merger, technology upgrade or coverage issues, faster time-to-market using new technology features or new wireless technology, mergers etc are examples of benefits of using multi-MNO solution.

However, development of multi-MNO solution poses significant challenges as well. For initial product launch with faster time-to-market considerations, it may be harder to justify multi-MNO solution which is likely to take longer to implement.  Development of multi-MNO solution requires significant wireless product development experience which is not the focus of businesses in vertical markets except Telecom MNOs or Cable providers. In our view, multi-MNO solution is going to be different for different market verticals. Industry forums in different market verticals should work together to create an architecture, design and reference implementation that can be used by all businesses in an industry vertical with minor tweaks for differentiation. This could be developed as community funded program which is managed by mobile industry experts.

Enterprise needs to engage with mobile experts to help navigate this complex requirement and Mobilestack can help. Ask us for more details.

E-SIM – needed or not?

E-SIM solution was initially developed by Telematics industry forum working together with GSMA to solve subscription management issue as vehicles are sold or moved across country and continental boundaries or due to customer preference changes.  This technology was later adopted for smartphones and Wearables as part of broader GSMA effort to meet device manufacturer’s request and interest.  In a way, this is a good example of how good technology solution is created to serve pressing market needs.

E-SIM solution was specifically designed to enable change of MNO subscription over-the-air. Obviously, this solution is needed only when Enterprise mobile /IoT solution is using multiple-MNOs. This option can also be considered if Enterprise wants to support multiple-MNOs in future.  Many MNOs support e-SIM solution today.  E-SIM solution can also be considered as part of future-proofing of Enterprise solution

Enterprise needs to consider this feature based on use-case requirements and mobile strategy. Since technology is new, inter-MNO transfer has its challenges for smooth execution. However, technology is improving rapidly and likely to remove operational challenges soon.

Enterprise needs to engage with mobile experts to help navigate this complex requirement and Mobilestack can help. Ask us for more details.

MNO Relationship Management

MNO relationship management refers to Enterprise IT application integration with MNO’s subscription management and billing solution. This is an important operational piece which is used for device management, customer on-boarding, subscriber management, device activation and localization of Enterprise devices.  Good integration of Enterprise application with MNO’s IT subscriber management portal is very important. In our experience, both, MNO and Enterprise shall equally benefit in making this integration work smoothly.  Since MNOs main focus is on Consumer side, their Enterprise IT-solutions are still evolving and may not be as smooth for Enterprise device on-boarding and activation. Similarly, there can be other issues such as understanding gaps of how MNOs portal / subscriber management works, Enterprise Application issues which can contribute to bad end-user experience and higher %age of customer returns. Easily, this can prove to be very costly for Enterprise or/and MNO. Periodic operational review between Enterprise and MNO is also recommended to mitigate these risks.  Through testing of such procedures should also be done.  This testing should include several geographic locations (including roaming locations) to ensure that device activation and customer on-boarding works well across full geographic scope of Enterprise product launch. Good knowledge of MNO’s IT and network is also necessary to ensure that full testing is completed. Good operational level relationship with well-defined escalation procedures should also be created to ensure that end-user issues can be solved in a timely manner. Refer to another article “Ten steps of adding LTE to a Wearable” to understand lifecycle issues of launching a product with cellular connectivity.

Enterprise-MNO relationship has many pain-points despite best efforts of Enterprise and MNO to make this marriage successful. So, what is the best option to make this marriage work? Use a marriage counselor – introducing Managed MNO Services for Enterprise. Mobilestack Inc can offer Managed MNO services to eliminate such pain-point. Ask us for more details.

Instead of trying DIY option with costly mistakes and pain-points for MNOs as well as Enterprise productivity, Enterprise is better off hiring Managed MNO Services as part of in-house expertise & knowledge to use best practices of working with MNOs for Mobile connectivity Solution using Plan, Build, Operate model to ensure best result.

Conclusion

Enterprise cellular-IoT will bring a number of challenging decisions for business leaders to make, as well as difficulties with the complexities of development and implementation. To address these Enterprise-IoT challenges, Telecom/Carrier center of Excellence, in partnership with mobile consulting experts, should be created within enterprise with measurable results and ROI objectives.

It is clear from the exploration of the challenges featured within this report that proper strategy and planning is needed to ensure good results during build and operational phase of such projects. There is still plenty of confusion within the market caused by the pace at which technology evolves, but this fragmented landscape is not something that enterprises should have to deal with on their own.

In order to overcome these challenges, senior decision makers should be prepared to take risks, embracing the failures which will inevitably occur as learning opportunities rather than backwards steps, and perhaps most importantly they need to be brave with their investments in Enterprise-IoT Solutions and Services.

Mobilestack Inc is an expert in Mobile and Wireless technology and available to help in proper planning and project implementation of Enterprise cellular-IoT / Edge solution projects. Contact us for more details.

Mobilestack Inc offers free initial consulting to better understand value proposition of hiring Mobilestack Inc for Enterprise cellular-IoT connectivity projects

Would you like to learn more about how we can help clients in solving Enterprise Cellular-IoT and MNO-relationship pain-points? Contact us for more details.

Top Enterprise-Mobility Challenges: How to Tackle

Executive summary

Enterprise move to Mobile Platform is a necessity with wireless connection becoming a default option for connecting everything. Enterprise Cellular Connectivity requirement is growing in many different ways. However, adding cellular connectivity as part of Enterprise IT, mobile strategy and products have a lot of challenges and pain points that senior decision makers must weigh against the benefits, in order to achieve ROI, productivity and new revenue / products objectives.

This causes many difficulties for the leadership of enterprise IT and product development departments to combat, but Cellular Connectivity & value-added services is a necessary component of gaining advantages over competitors both as an employer, and a business, in the modern world.

1.  Mobile strategy & planning

Mobile technology can no longer be ignored as a key component of how people go about their daily lives in the modern world, and every organization should be attempting to build an understanding of how to leverage it to improve their business.

Enterprise is adopting Mobile & Cellular technology in many different ways.  Mobile office is becoming essential part of every enterprise and Enterprise-IT is looking for best ways to maintain security with high-level of connectivity to ensure business agility and productivity. The de-facto method of connectivity has become Wireless Connectivity.

Enterprise Wireless should ideally be approached at the drawing board with a forward-thinking, well-educated and robust strategy that aligns with the fundamental goals of the entire business.

While this in itself is a challenge for Enterprise leaders, they must ensure that the senior executives of the organization are fully bought-in to their mobile strategy, and that there is a positive mind-set towards the transformative nature of such technologies upheld throughout.

Beyond these core aspects of introducing mobility into an organization, the strategic vision also needs to answer the diverse range of questions presented by such a fragmented and vast marketplace which is constantly evolving.

CIOs will typically place mobility high in their IT priorities, but mobility is no where near high enough in terms of IT budgets, which is a mistake being made by a large number of organizations. IT leaders have been talking about mobile technology in terms of strategy for some time now, but levels of investment and resulting implementations are still not driving the necessary business transformation.

To navigate these challenging processes and essentially reach the universal goals that mobile technology should be pointing towards, enterprises should seek help and guidance from experienced partners and solution providers when devising their mobile strategies, and trust the expertise at their disposal.

Firstly, a mobile strategy should not aim to look too far into the future, because change within the marketplace happens so fast, organizations need to have a dynamic strategy which focuses on present opportunities and considers scalability. Furthermore, failure to involve all the right stakeholders and lines of business when mapping out a strategy will hinder mobility from re-defining mission-critical workflows and processes.

One increasingly popular method of nurturing this universal engagement throughout an organization is by establishing a Mobile Centre of Excellence, which brings together representation of all business units with industry experts and maximises the use of the most relevant expertise for all aspects of enterprise mobility.

Although this is traditionally a larger enterprise initiative, it is a concept which can be useful for leveraging existing IT capabilities, helping to define standards, provide better educated decision making for vendor selection, and guide other important steps within the strategy.

This can facilitate the governance to become mobile first, saving time, money and risk for the organization.

It is then critical to understand that mobility is a conduit for business innovation, and can deliver immeasurable improvements to enterprises that implement such technologies with a sufficient strategy in place. The companies that have taken the biggest leaps towards success with mobility, and towards becoming truly mobile-first, have often been cited as those with higher tolerances for failure.

Perhaps the most important thing to be aware of when investing in mobility, and subsequently deploying complex mobile solutions throughout a business, is that it is ok to fail, but those failures must be used to learn and to move forward more successfully in future.

This will help the organization overcome any fear factor related to the decision to invest in mobility, presenting the opportunity to maximise the potential of their implementations.

2.  Migration to Cloud + Mobile

Migration to Cloud (public or Private or Hybrid) is a growing trend considered by Enterprise as part of operational efficiency. As Enterprise applications are moved to Cloud, it is a good idea to consider a cloud choice which is best suited for migration to Mobile as one combined effort or future effort depending on Enterprise priority. However, factors to facilitate migration to Mobile must be considered during planning stage for migration to Cloud project.

This can involve making the decision between re-architecting existing applications for a mobile setting, or investing in developing new applications for specific use cases, as well as optimising all mobile systems within an organization to provide enhanced productivity and efficiency for the workforce.

3. Expected Mobile User Experience

When introducing mobile technology into workflows, the main objective is developing a working environment on a mobile device that allows employees to do the same work they can do at their desk, from virtually any location at any time.

However, the main challenge which underlines the strategic decision to mobilize within a business is to encourage and achieve user adoption of these apps, by delivering an intuitive and satisfying mobile experience.

Without a positive user experience, mobile apps will not be used to their full potential, and if apps are not fully adopted by employees, an organization will never gain the return on their investment that they planned for.

When stated in this way, it becomes clear just how important user experience is to the success of mobility deployments throughout an enterprise. It is all too frequent that IT departments overlook the experience their employees will encounter when working in a mobile setting, and as a result they settle for the average.

It is vital to ensure that shortcuts are never being taken in this area, otherwise employee satisfaction will not be achieved, and neither will a strong ROI. As per Gartner, most popular web-application should be selected for migration to Mobile platform first to get strong ROI.

Once Mobile user experience for application is well defined, enterprises can dedicate the necessary level of investment into ensuring that their chance of user adoption is maximised, focusing on the quality of user experience as a high priority in terms of development resources and costs. Working with the right partners to advise, build, deploy and manage effective enterprise applications is essential to overcome difficulties achieving ROI and reaping the desired rewards with mobility.

4. Mobile Security

Concurrently, the aforementioned influx of devices causing management and security concerns within the enterprise is part of a wider spectrum of challenges related to the protection of corporate information and data.

There are, without doubt, a myriad of difficulties which arise from the ever-changing mobile landscape when attempting to instill the adequate security measures, and this area is the number one priority for many senior enterprise mobility practitioners.

Firstly, the appropriate authentication needs to be in place within all mobile channels, with access to the corporate network controlled at the correct levels. This will also involve the management of separate user identities in certain cases. Enterprise applications must then be secured to prevent data leakage when being used on personal devices.

Unfortunately for enterprises, employees themselves are also an enormous risk to security, especially when operating on mobile devices. Email and file sharing habits, accompanied by the use of unauthorised apps and similar hazardous behaviour will often raise concerns among IT leaders.

With all these issues to comprehend, it is then crucial to maintain the efficiency of these protected mobile channels to prevent the security measures from hindering employee productivity or satisfaction levels.

Security will remain a persistent and prominent issue in the mobile space, so organizations cannot be hesitant and wait for a miracle solution to solve the challenges for them. Unlike other aspects of mobility, security is a constant across industry, business size and use case, and it is absolutely essential for any organization to ensure the sufficient measures are taken to secure corporate data regardless of the mobile initiative.

IT leaders should be prepared to trial security strategies and learn from their mistakes, investing the necessary resources in order to ensure they do not suffer from a severe breach or attack.

There are many diverse and agile solutions available in the current market, many of which are now focusing heavily on applications and data, which can help solve these security issues for enterprises, with complex and meticulous capabilities. No matter what solutions are implemented, IT leaders need to consistently encourage the correct use of the highest quality mobile security tools available, throughout the entire enterprise and across all lines of business.

To truly cover the needs of a secure mobile strategy, organizations will want to nurture a multi-layered approach that can prevent threats against their sensitive and valuable information. They should authenticate their enterprise applications, reinforce this with some form of agile device management solution, and then ensure their wider corporate networks are also equipped with measures of protection.

5. Multi-MNO Support – Pros & Cons

Enterprise wants to use multiple MNOs for company business, products and services. However, MNO wants exclusive relationship with Enterprise. Enterprise relationship with MNO is not always a smooth experience despite best effort of MNO and Enterprise to make this marriage successful.

95% of organizations allow employee owned devices to be used for work purpose. Cellular connectivity is getting added as part of company products and services and support of all MNOs for company business and services is critical. This is in fundamental conflict with MNO-mission of building exclusive relationships with Enterprise businesses.

How to best support multiple MNOs for Enterprise business? It is not easy. Each MNO has different way of working with enterprise.  Adding each MNO as part of Enterprise relationship has a cost and pain-points which has to be analyzed for benefits.

Much like cloud development, using MNO infrastructure for cellular connection is proprietary and effort is needed to integrate every new MNO as part of Enterprise IT and product configuration. This is where hiring an expert to help in development of multi-MNO support and mobile strategy development is important and cost-effective instead of trying to Do-It-Yourself (DIY).

Therefore, Enterprise IT and product development decision makers should look at MNO-support options very carefully and strive for multi-MNO support as strategic shift. In long run, multi-MNO support is always desirable and keeps Enterprise-IT and product development adopt to best connectivity options as cellular technology evolves or MNO business changes (such as MNO merger or late adoption of new technology).

Employee Mobility for work has following options:

  • Separate business mobile device Vs personal device
  • Use personal device for business purpose – BYOD

Both options have pros and cons.  BYOD requires multi-MNO support by Enterprise-IT. Separate business device allows company to choose one operator and extend / support only one MNO for corporate assets.

6. Mobile Application Strategy

Balancing security with usability, to enable productivity for users within large corporate IT networks, is a challenge which naturally serves the key step of enterprise mobile strategies, which is developing and deploying mobile applications.

Within this critical process, there are many decisions which must be made that can be extremely challenging for IT leaders if they are not fully equipped with the necessary resources or expertise.

This can include deciding whether to develop apps in-house, or finding the right partners to work with when outsourcing development, imploring a BYOT approach, code-less development, HTML5, native apps, and even hybrid, custom or cloud-based apps.

These issues are compounded by cost of development, customization, testing, successful deployment, and as previously mentioned, adoption of the enterprise applications. All of these aspects will be challenging in specific ways based on the industry verticals that enterprises operate in, as well as the types of devices, operating systems and also use cases that the apps must be compatible with.

Once apps are deployed throughout the organization, it is then important that they can be properly hosted and maintained under the necessary amount of control by the IT department. Designing apps without considering their full lifecycle and the related support is a significant weakness in the opinion of David Krebs, Executive Vice President, VDC Research; another Enterprise Mobility Exchange Advisory Council mainstay. Understanding the lifecycle of apps is a crucial component of the process, and many organizations don’t think from the standpoint of how their mobile deployments will need to be upgraded, which in turn becomes a pain point down the road.

At the core of all of these issues, the question enterprises must be able to answer when devising their strategy is what functionalities and requirements they need to satisfy with their mobile apps. Once it is understood, the route to take in terms of development will appear to be clearer and more straight-forward.

There is also a significant opportunity in custom development for mobile enterprises, and that is commonly met through internal development or third-party solution providers, with more and more standardization occurring in terms of reducing the time spent on development, and the task of then integrating and deploying those apps.

Whichever option is taken in this area by organizations, it is critical to make these decisions at the beginning of the process, and understand exactly what is needed from the apps to ensure the decision is the correct one. When budgeting for both the time and costs of the development, enterprises should weigh up the pros and cons, considering all the tools available.

As long as the security, the maintenance and the usability of the applications are built into the development strategy, the investment will be justified by the adoption among the workforce.

Conclusion

Due to its highly transformative nature, enterprise mobility will always bring with it a number of challenging decisions for business leaders to make, as well as difficulties with the complexities of development and implementation. To tackle migration to mobile platform challenges, Enterprise center of Excellence, in partnership with mobile consulting experts, should be created within enterprise with measurable results and ROI objectives.

It is clear from the exploration of the six challenges featured within this report that there is a great deal of crossover between the diverse areas of enterprise mobility within an organization, which makes it even more important to ensure the approach to mobility, and the solutions that are implemented in doing so, are fully understood and leveraged correctly. There is still plenty of confusion within the market caused by the pace at which technology evolves, but this fragmented landscape is not something that enterprises should have to deal with on their own.

In order to overcome these challenges, senior decision makers should be prepared to take risks, embracing the failures which will inevitably occur as learning opportunities rather than backwards steps, and perhaps most importantly they need to be brave with their investments in the mobile productivity solutions available.

Mobilestack Inc is an expert in Mobile and Wireless technology and available to help navigate this complex transformation to Mobile or Mobile + Cloud. We offer free webinars on this topic for education purpose and enable Enterprise to take more educated decisions in the marketplace.  Join us for free webinars.

Mobilestack Inc also offers free initial consulting to better understand value proposition of hiring Mobilestack for Enterprise Mobility consulting & engineering services.

Contact Mobilestack Inc for Enterprise Mobility Consulting packages which will help in providing regular updates on challenges of Enterprise Mobility strategy, Migration to Mobile+Cloud, Mobile Security and Multi-MNO relationship aspects.