Tag: Wi-Fi

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Reduce Corporate Expenses by Configuring Devices and Delivering Apps to Users with MDM

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When you’re ready to deploy #apps or provision Wi-Fi, certificates, VPN or email to #mobile devices, get an #EMM solution to provide #MDM.

With the basics of device-level security and policy enforcement covered by Exchange ActiveSync, you’re ready to take the next step in providing value to your employees. Extending access to PIM, delivering apps to devices and provisioning functionality over the air was the reason the earliest mobile device management (MDM) packages were built. I should know since I co-founded the first cloud-based MDM company back in 2003. The space has broadened significantly and is now referred to as enterprise mobility management (EMM) with an evolving set of features. The MDM component of EMM delivers:

  • Support for the most widely used mobile operating systems
  • Software lifecycle management that deploys, upgrades and retires apps
  • Operating system configuration management that enforces the IT policies applied to devices, monitors compliance and provides auditing
  • Simplifies users’ lives by provisioning pre-configured settings for email, VPN, Wi-Fi and certificates via profiles
  • Asset management and usage of devices and apps
  • Telecom expense management
  • Service management and remote helpdesk support capabilities
  • Scalability to support hundreds of thousands of devices

Reduce your expenses and improve user productivity by remotely configuring devices and delivering apps to users without needing additional support staff. What is your organization doing do help employees configure their mobile devices and get the apps they need?

Learn how to digitally transform your company in my newest book, “Mobile Strategies for Business: 50 Actionable Insights to Digitally Transform your Business.”

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Click here to purchase a copy of my book today and start transforming your business!

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Improve User Experience by Extending Wireless to Customers and Employees

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Use #Femtocells + #mobile broadband routers to extend #wireless to mobile customers & employees without coverage in buildings or at remote work sites.

It goes without saying that not all organizations are the same. They don’t all reside in offices in downtown skyscrapers or on corporate campuses. The way employees work and how customers are served varies greatly. It’s important your mobile strategy reflects these differences.

Let’s talk about employees that don’t work in your Wi-Fi saturated office. Just because your workforce has corporate-liable or personally-liable mobile devices, doesn’t mean they have the wireless coverage to make them work. In the construction business, you have a group of employees performing tasks outside at a work site. To ensure this team can connect to corporate resources, you may need to deploy a Femtocell and a mobile broadband router. This is a mobile hot spot on steroids that allows you to extend cellular coverage to areas where you need it.

Oftentimes you have to extend wireless coverage to your customers. If you own a sports stadium you have to enhance coverage while supporting a higher density of connected devices. If you own a casino or convention center, it’s imperative you provide pervasive indoor cellular coverage so your guests can keep using their phones. These cases require you to deploy microcells as well as additional data backhaul capacity. As always, apply pressure on mobile operators to provide network coverage if they want to keep your business.

Improve customer experience and user productivity by extending wireless coverage to employees and customers alike. What is your organization doing to bring wireless to its important stakeholders?

Learn how to digitally transform your company in my newest book, “Mobile Strategies for Business: 50 Actionable Insights to Digitally Transform your Business.”

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Click to purchase a copy of my book today and start transforming your business!

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Reduce Business Risk by Protecting Corporate Assets and IP from BYOD Employees

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Send “Bring your own Device” #BYOD #mobile employees to the #Internet via a separate Wi-Fi #network versus giving them direct access to internal servers.

Many companies today have a guest network. This is a separate Wi-Fi network that visitors use to access the Internet when they come meet with employees. Some of these guest networks require a password given to them by the person at the front desk and others don’t use security.

Now imagine a guest network on steroids serving all your mobile employees when they’re in the office and extending the data plans on their personal devices.

I’m sorry, but I still don’t believe in the concept of the trusted enterprise wireless network where mobile employees have direct access to internal servers. Compromised mobile devices and apps can unwittingly attack those networks and servers. Send them out to the Internet and have them come back into the Intranet through a secure path. Your company has already spent a lot of time and effort creating a secure Extranet for employees who need remote access. Put your reverse proxies, firewalls, routers, VNETs and switches to use for all mobile employees. Instead of maintaining two classes of access to internal resources, just reuse the one you already have.

Moving into the future, Intranet resources will disappear as everything migrates to the cloud. Concepts like remote access and internal servers will vanish and your super-fast guest network will look like a stroke of genius.

Reduce Risk to you corporate assets and intellectual property by blocking direct Wi-Fi access to Intranet resources. Is your organization allowing employees to access internal servers with their personal mobile devices?

Learn how to digitally transform your company in my newest book, “Mobile Strategies for Business: 50 Actionable Insights to Digitally Transform your Business.”

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Click to purchase a copy of my book today and start transforming your business!

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Improve Employee Productivity by Enhancing Corporate Infrastructure to Support BYOD

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The “Bring your own Device” #BYOD #mobile phenomenon has moved employees from 1:1 PC computing to 5:1 mobility requiring enhanced infrastructure & #cloud workloads.

More and more BYOD employees are using their own laptops, tablets and smartphones to access corporate data, apps and other services to do their jobs. It started with email in the early 2000s, progressed to synched calendars and contacts, the mobile web and then an explosion of apps. This transformation took employees from Ethernet-connected PCs to multiple, wireless-connected mobile devices.

Imagine you live in a city with 100,000 citizens. Over the course of just a few years, the population swells to 500,000. Asleep at the wheel, city leaders and civil servants didn’t build new roads, add mass-transit, increase the sewer systems or deploy new power cabling to meet the needs of this larger city. This reflects the infrastructures of most corporations today.

The BYOD tsunami combined with the impact of the Cloud and IoT requires significant infrastructure upgrades in order to cope:

  • More bandwidth via redundant, Internet connected and private fiber circuits.
  • Faster routers, switches, proxies and firewalls with increased capacity.
  • A managed Wi-Fi infrastructure using multiple channels, higher access point density and the most bandwidth possible.
  • Dramatically beefed-up DNS, email and line of business servers with shorter DHCP leases.

Improve User Productivity by building a corporate infrastructure that supports the unique needs of today’s BYOD workforce. What kinds of improvements has your organization made to its infrastructure to handle of onslaught of mobile and IoT devices?

Learn how to digitally transform your company in my newest book, “Mobile Strategies for Business: 50 Actionable Insights to Digitally Transform your Business.”

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Click to purchase a copy of my book today and start transforming your business!

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Ray Ozzie sees the Dawn of a New Day for Microsoft

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Five years after Ray Ozzie penned The Internet Services Disruption, he reflects on Microsoft’s move to the cloud.

While he’s most proud of Windows Azure and SQL Azure, he also gives our competitors their due by mentioning that they have out-executed us when it comes to mobile experiences.  He harps on the subject of how complexity kills and then challenges us to close our eyes and form a realistic picture of what a post-PC world might actually look like.

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Ray goes on to state that those who can envision a plausible future that’s brighter than today will earn the opportunity to lead.  His ultimate dream is to move us toward a world of :

  • Cloud-based continuous services that connect us all and do our bidding.  These are websites and cloud-based agents that we can rely on for more and more of what we do.  On the back end, they possess attributes enabled by our newfound world of cloud computing: They’re always-available and are capable of unbounded scale.
  • Appliance-like connected devices enabling us to interact with those cloud-based services.  This goes beyond the PC and will increasingly come in a breathtaking number of shapes and sizes, tuned for a broad variety of communications, creation & consumption tasks.  Each individual will interact with a fairly good number of these connected devices on a daily basis – their phone / internet companion; their car; a shared public display in the conference room, living room, or hallway wall.

As a Mobility Architect at Microsoft, I’m excited that my commitments align with this vision in connecting the Peanut Butter of the Cloud with the Chocolate of devices.  Wireless data networks, bandwidth, latency and signal coverage are the wildcards when it comes to making this vision a reality.  That’s why you’ll always see my concern for this Wireless wildcard reveal itself in all the Cloud-connected mobile architectures I design.

Check out the rest of Ray’s new memo at http://ozzie.net/docs/dawn-of-a-new-day/.

-Rob

Sharing my knowledge and helping others never stops, so connect with me on my blog at https://robtiffany.com , follow me on Twitter at https://twitter.com/RobTiffany and on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/robtiffany

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