Why is it important to manage and secure your mobile device fleet remotely?

4 minutes

In 2020, there were more than 78 millions mobile workers in the United States. Indeed, between employees using their personal smartphones to access business data and companies providing professional devices to facilitate their team’s work, a lot of confidential data circulates every day. As an IT administrator, managing all of the company’s devices without any centralisation of information can easily become a real headache. That is why it is necessary to be able to remotely manage and secure your mobile devices from the same place.

Let’s see in 5 points, why and how to manage your mobile fleet:

Having hundreds of business devices to manage without any centralized view is a real waste of time for IT departments, which are constantly bothered with configuration errors and are forced to bring back mobile smartphones and tablets, which leads to a general loss of efficiency. Rather than having to configure a company’s devices one by one (settings, applications, wifi networks, configuration of contacts, etc.), it is better to carry out all these operations remotely, in order to save precious time.

The advantage of having a mobile device management software is that you can preconfigure different policies. Then, you can enroll all devices according to these specific configurations at a time. Furthermore, once the devices have been enrolled, rather than having to ask each user to update their applications manually, MDM software enables to push updates (both public and private applications), thus preventing users from ending up with out-of-date devices.

Once the devices have been enrolled via a MDM software, they are visible on a real-time synchronized dashboard. This dashboard contains classic information on the different models and brands of devices. It also contains information on the different versions of the MDM software depending on the devices, their synchronization status, information on the state and health of their battery, etc.

dashborad secure mobile devices

The advantage of having a quick view of the entire mobile fleet is to be able to check if there is an error on an unsynchronised device for example, but also that they are all regularly updated and also compliant with the company’s internal rules.

Regarding the internal rules, the advantage of centralizing the management of mobile devices via a MDM software is that you can configure your multiple Android smartphones and tablets according to the rules in your organization. No access to public wifi, passwords renewed every month, etc.

Some public or private organizations have restrictions specific to their business line, such as the use of an internal wifi network, wifi EAP for example, which must be deployed on all devices, without communicating the identifiers to users. TinyMDM allows you to configure this type of wifi network in a secure and hidden way. Password standards may also be required to secure access to business data, but it is difficult to verify that this regulation is actually implemented if it is not enforced by a mobile device management software.

How to locate a device deployed on site? How to help the user in case of an issue on his/her device? These questions are no longer existent as soon as the company invests in a MDM (Mobile Device Management) software. Indeed, the mobile management tool allows you to see each tablet or smartphone enrolled, on a map in real time.

Thanks to TinyMDM, Android MDM partner, it is also possible to remotely take control of an employee’s device in order to reduce maintenance. This feature helps to save time for the administrator and the employee.

remote control secure mobile devices

By managing a mobile fleet remotely, it is easy to secure your mobile devices and block access to business data in case of a security breach. If a device is lost or stolen, for example, the IT administrator is able to log into the MDM solution and change the device’s password, request the deletion of the work profile (on a BYOD smartphone) or request a factory reset of the device (if it belongs to the company), thus blocking access to confidential data.

wipe work profile

Securing the entire fleet remotely thanks to a management tool such as TinyMDM makes it possible to secure your mobile devices, both professional smartphones and tablets, as well as smartphones used in BYOD mode (Bring Your Own Device). Remember that 9 out of 10 companies need their employees to access company data from their own smartphones: not taking these devices into account in the business mobile fleet would mean securing only a small part of corporate data.