Mobile device management gives companies a great deal of control over employees’ devices, but for small- and midsized businesses that are embracing the bring-your-own-device movement, the technology can be too much complexity for too little gain.
Apart from the difficulties in implementing a mobile device management (MDM) solution, mixing the technology with employee-owned devices poses pitfalls for companies, especially smaller ones.
“Do you want to become responsible for my employees’ mobile devices? Do you want your IT department inside your mobile users’ lives? If the answer to those questions is no, then you don’t want mobile device management,” says Jonathan Sander, director of identity and access management strategy at Dell.
Currently, 61 percent of SMBs allow employees to use their own devices–a number that is set to jump to nearly 70 percent by the end of the year, according to Spiceworks, an IT community and service firm. The majority of those businesses have no specific solution for tracking their workers’ mobile devices, because–for the most part–they do not see a true need for a mobile-device management (MDM) solution, says Kathryn Pribish, the manager in charge of Spiceworks’ Voice of IT survey group. In a May 2013 survey of BYOD trends in small businesses, the company discovered that 56 percent of companies had no plans to implement mobile device management in the next six months.