Even before the work-from-anywhere revolution, employees increasingly expected to be able to access their work tools on any device, including their own mobile phones. While tools like Microsoft 365 are available for every mobile OS and handset, their availability creates new headaches for organisations, who need to manage and secure access and use of their intellectual property on devices over which they have no direct control.
As Kat Greenan, Microsoft Solutions Specialist at Core, explained, “Microsoft Intune lets us enrol the applications that we want to manage on personal devices so that administrators can control the access and assets on devices the enterprise doesn’t own. It lets us manage those tools separately, without needing access to the device itself. The user can enrol their device onto the company portal, and we can manage it from there — applying our own policies to the Microsoft business applications on the user’s phone, but without touching any of their personal data and apps.”
Managing the phone throughout its life
Client Solutions Director, Eamon McGann, explained that modern device management strategies need to address the entire lifecycle of the device, whoever owns it. “In our current remote working world, it’s important we can enrol and deploy that phone or laptop with zero touch, have it shipped to the user where they are direct from the manufacturer.
“Then we can continue to maintain and patch it, which has always been a challenge for organisations with BYOD policies, even in an office together. At the present time, devices should be updated at least 4 times a year with bigger updates, in addition to typical monthly application updates. This means happy users, as their phone runs and performs as well as possible, but from the enterprise point of view as well it provides the best protection against breaches and malware. Keeping them evergreen and up to date simply and easily, is good for everyone.”
When the phone reaches the end of its useful life, that can be managed in a secure way too, or sooner if required. During the remote work revolution, there have been fewer incidences of people leaving their phones on the bus or getting robbed in the street, but in the event of loss, it’s easy to revoke access to corporate apps and assets centrally — which is also useful when somebody leaves a job, under any circumstances. As Greenan explained, “They don’t have to come into the office if they’re leaving the organisation. In fact, we don’t have to see that device at any point, we can wipe our managed applications remotely.”
Modern device management is all about making things frictionless and easy for the user, from the moment they take it out of the box and everything sets itself up, to the day it’s securely decommissioned. And as McGann pointed out, this all feeds the quality of the employee experience.
“Research shows that for the Millennial generation in particular, one of the reasons they leave organisations and move on is that the tech is not good enough, there are expectations of a certain level from the consumer experience”
Keeping everyone’s favourite device managed and updated clearly has many benefits, and the tools exist now to streamline the entire process. So if you need to review your endpoint management and see what Microsoft’s modern mobile device management tools could do for your organisation, Core offers endpoint security workshops to help you control, manage and monitor endpoints, which you can book now.
