Enterprise mobility suite: a quick-fire guide for busy CEO

If you’re not already using Enterprise Mobility Management in your business, the chances are you soon will be.

With 59 percent of companies allowing employees to use their own devices for work, businesses need a security solution that can keep pace with a distributed working environment.

Enter Microsoft’s Enterprise Mobility Suite (EMS).In this guide, we’ll explore how Microsoft has cornered the mobility management market and how you can use EMS to secure your move to the modern workplace.

What is the Enterprise Mobility Suite?

Let’s start with a quick introduction. EMS is a set of tools built on Microsoft’s Azure cloud environment, making it easy to integrate with any device.

To help companies become more flexible in their approach to work, EMS secures four key areas:

● Users

● Devices

● Apps

● Data

In today’s workplace, we no longer store data in one place, so businesses need a new way to control their assets and intellectual property (IP). Through EMS, companies can keep tabs on their entire working environment from one screen.

Managing identity and access

Insider threats account for nearly 75 percent of all security breaches. But what can you do to mitigate harmful employee activity? While user security training is always valuable, restricting access to sensitive information can also reduce the chances of compromised data.

The EMS toolkit includes Azure Active Directory, which enables you to control the access employees have to certain files, data and apps. You can restrict access to any integrated app in just a few clicks, using a user’s single sign-on credentials. When an employee leaves the company, you can simply remove them from the system, without spending hours manually deleting them from every service.

Controlling devices and applications

A typical employee uses an average of 2.3 devices every day at work. If they use each of these to access company accounts, you need a way to secure them quickly and efficiently. Traditionally, you’d commission your IT department to provision and update these devices on a regular basis. But, with so many different systems to monitor, maintain and patch, this is no longer a viable option.

So, how does the Enterprise Mobility Suite help you work around this issue?

Devices

In this age where many private equity firms are embracing Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) amongst their workforce, Enterprise Mobility Suite (EMS), a function of Office 365, enables firms to make sure that sensitive data is stored separately to employee’s personal data, on their devices. If an employee loses their device, EMS allows users to delete all sensitive company data from the phone, without employees losing their own personal data, limiting the chances of data leaks, because of accidental loss of theft of a user’s device.

Apps

With Microsoft Intune, you can secure all the devices in your network, whether they operate on iOS, Windows, Android or MacOS. Using app protection policies, Intune distinguishes between personal data and corporate data (including 0365 emails) and protects it via the employee’s Azure AD credentials.

When employees know they can securely access company applications from any device, their productivity increases. For more tips on boosting workrate, check out the infographic below:

Building a secure, modern workplace

Today, flexible working is no longer a part-time perk, with 68 percent of enterprise employees stating that a choice of work devices makes them more productive. But, while new approaches to work can help businesses stay competitive and attract better talent, transformation shouldn’t come at the cost of compromised security.

With Microsoft 365, you can integrate your Office 365 apps with the Enterprise Mobility Suite to create a safer, more efficient working environment. Once security becomes a natural part of the ecosystem, it’s far easier to manage and scale technology without the risk of growing pains.

As Microsoft CEO, Satya Nadella, puts it:

‘Ultimately, we have to empower employees so that modern work can happen, they can collaborate, they can communicate in new ways, and companies can get more out of their people.’