Why is Enterprise Mobility Management a Catalyst for Digital Transformation?
Mobile device management, and enterprise mobility performance is essential for a productive mobile workforce, now that deskless workers account for more than 80% of the global workforce1. Mobile devices and real-time applications that run on them synchronise and manage mobile workers to enable new levels of operational efficiency, customer experience, and entirely new business models.
Effectively offering mobility-based services depends on more than just managing mobile devices. Competitive advantage, profitability and brand loyalty are driven by mobile device connectivity and app performance management.
How Does SaaS Drive Enterprise Mobility Strategies?
SaaS and cloud-hosted solutions give organisations the flexibility, scalability, and mobility they need to support a mobile workforce and accelerate digital transformation initiatives. They are ideal for mobile workers because they can be accessed from any location and on a variety of devices, including smartphones and tablets.
This is particularly important for organisations with a large mobile workforce, as employees can access applications and data regardless of their location, enabling them to work more efficiently and productively.
Which Industries Benefit the Most from Enterprise Mobility?
Mobile applications and workforce mobility are transforming a wide range of industries, enabling organizations to work more efficiently, provide better service to customers, and gain a competitive advantage. Here are a few industries that are seeing significant benefits from mobile applications and workforce mobility:
- Healthcare: Mobile applications are helping healthcare professionals improve patient care and streamline workflows.
- Retail: Retailers are using mobile devices to track inventory, manage supply chains, and provide personalized experiences to customers.
- Transportation and logistics: tracking shipments, optimising routes, and managing inventory with mobile apps boosts efficiency and cuts costs.
- Manufacturing: Mobile apps track equipment, inventory, production schedules, and workers, improving efficiency and quality.
Where Does Enterprise Mobility Management (EMM) Fall Short?
Enterprise mobility / mobile device management solutions are essential to deploying, maintaining, and securing mobile users, devices and apps, but lack detailed application and network performance monitoring capabilities that are essential to ensuring mobile workers are productive.
When mobile apps are slow or unresponsive, poor network performance is often to blame. While EMM/MDM solutions can detect basic Wi-Fi or cellular connectivity problems, these are only the first step into the complex end-to-end connectivity matrix between users and applications.
The Dependency of Enterprise Mobility on End-to-End Network Performance
Device connectivity to Wi-Fi, LTE or 5G is only the first of many hops along the network path to SaaS and cloud-hosted apps, which can include:
- Wi-Fi / cellular connectivity
- Enterprise LAN
- VPN / secure cloud gateways (SASE / CASB)
- Direct interet access / ISPs
- SD WAN, MPLS and hybrid networks
- Cloud networks
- CDNs
Furthermore, many mobile apps connect to multiple hostnames, cloud hosting locations, third-party plugins, and exchange data with other apps, resulting in multiple network paths from the device to what appears to be a single application.
When any part of this complex network path experiences performance degradation, high latency, or packet loss, application and mobile workforce productivity suffers.
Without end-to-end network performance visibility, enterprise mobility managers and IT helpdesk teams are frequently unable to identify the root cause of mobility issues, resulting in time-consuming troubleshooting efforts and preventing them from proactively optimising mobile device performance.
How to Quickly Resolve Enterprise Mobility Performance Issues
Fixing and optimising mobile workforce performance begins with in-depth visibility into the complete network path from device to application.
Beyond simple connectivity status and wireless signal strength, deeper visibility is required to fully assess mobile device network performance, including:
- Per-hop latency and packet loss
- Real-time route and path change reporting
- ISP, MPLS, and cloud network performance
- Connectivity setup delays due to DNS / TLS and CASB/SASE proxies
It’s also important to note that wireless signal strength is often unrelated to application performance, as interference often causes packet loss and retransmissions that result in latency and application transaction errors even with a ‘5-bars’ connection.
Complete Mobile Connectivity Performance Insight
Mobility managers can deploy simple, lightweight applications like Kadiska’s Net-Tracer to enterprise mobile devices using EMM/MDM solutions or directly from the Google Play store.
Without impacting battery life or device performance, these background apps map out the full network path and provide the visibility required to determine the origin of network performance issues–or prove that it’s not to blame.
This increased visibility allows IT and mobility management teams to focus on steps to resolve mobility performance issues, whether they are caused by network, device, application, or cloud hosting performance.
Real-time and historical performance data reported by device, fleet, site-branch-store, and application are also critical in identifying opportunities to proactively optimise performance, and to provide the evidence required to to resolve issues originating from app vendors and service providers.
Fix Your Mobility Performance Issues
Get a demo of our Android, mobile, SaaS and network performance monitoring solutions used by leading retailers, manufacturers, logistics and healthcare providers. Discover how the Kadiska digital experience platform can help you quickly fix issues and uncover large-scale optimization opportunities.
