Look around your organization for a few minutes, taking careful note of smartphones, tablets, and even smart watches in use. You probably see a lot more mobile devices in use today than you did a year or two ago. Now think ahead a few years, to 2019. According to a new report by MarketsandMarkets, you’ll be seeing a lot more of them. In fact, the report predicts that the enterprise mobility management (EMM) market will be worth $15,224.1 million by 2019.

With a compound annual growth rate of 36.9 percent from 2014 to 2019, the EMM market is expected to grow at an eye-popping rate — and for good reason (Source: Benzinga). As more workers rely on their own devices, their actions have the potential to strain networks and compromise security. At the same time, enterprise mobility brings a wealth of advantages. Striking the right balance is essential.

Why Manage Enterprise Mobility?

Smartphones, tablets, and wearable devices are here to stay, and employees are using them to connect to corporate networks. A recent study by BitDefender found that 60 percent of respondents had done so. Today’s mobile devices can virtually “do it all,” and your employees do not want to maintain and carry around two separate “do it all” devices. Even former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton resisted carrying around two Blackberry devices in favor of one for both official and personal use.

Because your employees will be accessing enterprise networks via personal devices, enterprise mobility must be managed. You’ll need to ensure that mobile workers have a secure means of accessing business applications and data regardless of device type. You’ll also need to offer effective mobile productivity and collaboration tools so that they do not feel the need to use external, and potentially less secure, applications.

Enterprise mobility also has its advantages. For example, service technicians can receive service and work order requests in real time while out in the field. They can also update their work orders immediately as well as order parts or schedule follow-up service. They can capture signatures or collect mobile payments. In short, you probably want mobile devices in many, if not all, of your employees’ hands.

In addition to managing mobility for security purposes, you’ll also want to manage it for performance. Mission critical applications such as sales force automation, business intelligence, and CRM need to perform regardless of where the end user happens to be. Meanwhile, many applications, especially videoconferencing and streaming applications, require extensive bandwidth. With multiple users using bandwidth-intensive applications on mobile and fixed devices, your enterprise network will begin to feel the strain.

Managing Enterprise Mobility Now

The EMM market is likely to be thriving in 2019, but what about now? According to MarketsandMarkets, the market was worth $3,169 million in 2014. EMM solutions such as Aryaka’s IP Application Delivery as a Service currently exist, providing optimized, enterprise-grade connectivity to remote and mobile users along with a superior means of accessing centralized enterprise resources (Source: Aryaka).

Look around your organization. Enterprise mobility is everywhere! How are you managing it?

Works Cited:

1. Benzinga, “Enterprise Mobility Management Market Worth $15,224.1 Million by 2019 – New Report by MarketsandMarkets,” – http://www.benzinga.com/pressreleases/15/04/p5413230/enterprise-mobility-management-market-worth-15-224-1-million-by-2019-ne

2. Aryaka, “Use Case: Mobile Acceleration,” – http://www.aryaka.com/use-cases/mobile-acceleration/

Maxwell Pierce is the author of this content, and he is an experienced writer focusing on the field of enterprise networks and technologies to improve application and network performance.