The Benefits of BYOD and Mobile Strategies for Canadian Organizations

According to a new Citrix Mobility in Business Report, Canadian businesses are beginning to embrace mobility in order to gain a competitive advantage. In the report, we discover that companies that fail to adopt a mobile strategy can lose the competitive edge and face a variety of security threats.

The report found that 71% of enterprises consider mobility to be a top priority for their business, while 63% consider mobility to be the greatest factor in gaining a competitive advantage. Almost half of the companies surveyed have implemented technologies to support mobile devices. Of these companies, 48% are using a mobile device management solution and 47% are using mobile application management.

In addition, BYOD is becoming increasingly popular with enterprises, with 71% of companies accommodating the use of personally owned devices. Today, it’s not just executives using personally owned devices, a whole host of employees are using personal smartphones or mobile devices to log into their email and work applications due to the convenience of BYOD.

However, 76% of the companies embracing BYOD estimate that more than 100 unidentified devices are accessing their networks on a daily basis. With BYOD, companies have another dimension of security issues to face on a wide range of device, both corporate and employee owned. Ultimately, the goal of a mobile strategy is to allow employees the flexibility to use any device, without compromising privacy or user experience.

In the Citrix Mobility in Business Report, organizations claimed to be facing certain problems when implementing their mobility initiatives. On average, there are three main barriers preventing support for mobility in the workplace, including the following:

• Support for numerous mobile operating systems (36%)
• Aligning systems with mobile purposes (37%)
• Security controls for new clients and devices (38%)

With a mobile strategy, organizations are able to support the standardization of device types and service provisioning to reduce overall support costs. In addition, the standardization reduces risk and ensures a constant level of endpoint security. Organizations are also able to align the mobile strategy with security policies to maintain the confidentiality of networked resources.

An adequate mobile policy can also provide a more flexible work environment, ensuring employees can remain productive and connected from any location. A mobile world is approaching us inevitably, and organizations can’t afford to avoid the BYOD and mobility trends.

With the benefits achieved through operational cost efficiencies, increased productivity, improved employee morale, and customer satisfaction; there’s no reason for organizations to wait. Start planning your mobile strategy, and embrace the benefits of a mobile workplace.