Mobile devices like tablets, smartphones, and laptops have become a famous option for modern businesses. They are providing the productivity and flexibility that the current mobile workforce needs. Most people are now using mobile devices due to the introduction of remote work. This increase in mobile devices can pose financial and security risks to organizations. Due to this, mobile device lifecycle management is a complicated problem for IT organizations and departments.

Organizations need to create a new MDLM plan. It should support its applications, firmware, and new devices. There are various benefits of creating a good device lifecycle management strategy. In this article, we are going to talk about the importance of Mobile Device lifecycle management for your business.

What is MDLM or Mobile Device Lifecycle management?

MDLM or Mobile Device Lifecycle Management will help you in managing mobile devices like smartphones, tablets, and laptops across their lifecycle. It will help you in managing mobile devices from procurement to retirement. MDLM will help you in covering your devices, associated services, content, and applications.

A good MDLM solution will consist of tools, procedures, policies, and processes that will help you in device management, logistics, warehousing, shipping, and technical support. Device lifecycle management will consist of these activities:

Procurement of mobile devices like smartphones and laptops.
You need to enrol devices in your MDM or Mobile Device management system.
Configuring your security settings.
Creating new user accounts and managing access rights.
Delivering your devices to your employees.
Recovery and deallocation of your devices after their lifecycle.
Refreshing and repairing your used devices.
Warehousing of deallocated and procured devices.
Help you in retiring your devices after their lifecycle.

MDLM will help you in getting the right devices for your employees. These devices will have the right application and configuration. Your employees can use these devices from anywhere in the world. Lifecycle management will help you in ensuring repair services, troubleshooting, and functionality. MDLM will help you in ensuring security. You will have better visibility of your devices. MDLM will ensure that you can keep track of devices through the entire device lifecycle.

Difference between Mobile device management (MDM) and Mobile device lifecycle management (MDLM)

MDM or Mobile Device Management is an IT solution that will help you in managing your mobile devices. You can manage all your mobile devices from a centralized location. MDMs’ main aim is to deal with updating software and applications, tracking, monitoring, and configuring the devices. These solutions will help you in ensuring device security.

Your MDM solutions will become active when you receive the device hardware. It will help you in addressing the content, applications, software, security, and permissions of your device. MDM solutions will mainly focus on data security and endpoint protection. However, it won’t cover services like device repair, retirement, warehousing, logistics, and shipping.

MDLM will offer you a complete solution for managing devices. It will help you in managing your devices from procurement to retirement. MDM will cover only a few of these activities. Thus, MDM is one of the solutions that is used in MDLM.

Why MDLM is important for your business?

The world has moved towards remote work due to the coronavirus pandemic. This has increased the pressure on IT departments and IT teams. They need to get everyone the devices that they need. Also, they need to ensure that the remote workforce is productive.

Organizations need to deal with the challenges of providing IT support to remote employees. They are investing their time in figuring out how to add and deploy new devices. Organizations are looking for effective ways to onboard new employees in a remote work environment.

There are various problems that organizations need to deal with. Misconfiguration, incorrect access privileges, and missing applications can impact the security of your organization. Companies are wasting a lot of capital on old and unused devices. They are using unsustainable practices as they don’t have access to e-wasting processes. There is a lack of visibility of IT inventory. This leads to duplicate devices and orders. Companies have overflowing IT closets without proper monitoring, insurance, or locks.

If you want to deal with these challenges, then you need to invest in MDLM tools. You need to think about the entire lifecycle supply chain. Organizations can solve all these problems by using MDLM services. These services will provide end-to-end device management solutions to your business.

Benefits of MDLM solutions

Unmanaged devices are a security risk for your organization

The main benefit of MDLM solutions is that they will help you in improving your security. MDLM solutions will help you in deploying the security solutions to every single device that is in your enterprise network.

These solutions will help you in controlling remote access to important data and information. They will help you in providing user authentication. You can wipe data remotely if your devices are stolen or lost. MDLM solutions will ensure that your devices are up-to-date. You can fix known security vulnerabilities by using the MDLM solution.

There are thousands of devices that are connected with every enterprise network. These will include devices like tablets and smartphones. It will provide various attack vectors to attackers. Thus, these devices pose a serious security threat to your business. MDLM solutions will help you in providing consistent and good mobile security to your enterprise network.

Cost savings

MDLM solutions will also help you in saving a lot of time and money. They will help you in providing support to your devices. The cost savings of these solutions can be more than you pay for the service itself. These solutions will also help you in increasing your productivity. It will help you in freeing up your resources and time.

Provisioning

MDLM solutions will help you in registering your new devices within your system. It will ensure that new devices have adequate resources. Authentication is another step inside the provisioning process. This will ensure that network access is given to properly credentialed and verified devices only. Every IoT or remote device should be authorized by your IT team before they join your network. This will help you in reducing the use of insecure or unauthorized software. It will ensure that your networks or devices can be used easily.

Control

You need to do some adjustments for increasing the efficiency of your devices. If you have IoT devices, then you might need to adjust the frequency of these devices. This will help you in storing a larger data set in your IoT devices. It can also help you in increasing the battery life of your devices.

Your organization should ensure that they can configure the devices after the deployment stage. This will ensure that all the devices will work properly. MDLM solutions will help you in configuring your devices. This will also help you in protecting your network from security issues. MDLM solutions will ensure that you can reset your devices from a remote location. This will provide additional security to your IT team. You can wipe data from stolen or lost devices.

Device monitoring

You also need to monitor your devices for anomalous behaviour and technical issues. However, you need to first set up a baseline of performance metrics. This will help you in addressing technical issues. If you are using IoT devices, then you should track analytics like CPU usage. This will help you in finding devices that require attention.

However, you can’t manually monitor your devices. MDLM solutions will help you in capturing and analyzing data from these devices. They will help you in streamlining the monitoring process. You don’t need to worry about manually managing this process. MDLM solutions will help you in archiving log files also.

Improved flexibility and workflows

MDLM solutions will help you in efficient workflow management and collaboration. This will ensure that your workers can work from remote locations and also from your office. MDLM solutions will help managers in quickly organizing project teams and assigning jobs. They can assign tasks to individual workers. MDLM solutions will also help you in monitoring the progress of different projects and tasks. These work tools will help your managers. It will help you in using the technology for making your internal options run efficiently and smoother.

Simplify IT demands

It is very difficult to manually manage your mobile devices. Your IT team needs to spend a lot of time and resources manually managing your devices. Your organization will keep growing with time. This simply means that the number of mobile devices in your network will keep increasing. A good MDLM solution will help you in simplifying this work. All the management tasks will be consolidated into a single platform. Your IT staff will have the support and tools that you need for effectively managing your mobile and remote network.

MDLM solutions will help your IT team in monitoring your devices. It will help you in monitoring devices for security vulnerabilities. This will ensure that your employees can work from a remote location. Organizations should invest in MDLM solutions as it will help you in making your IT department more productive. This will ensure that your IT department can effectively do their job.

Free your workforce

Workers are becoming more mobile with time. Most employees are now either working from home or are travelling for work. Thus, your employees are generally out of your office. However, you have to ensure that this is not hampering the productivity of your employees. MDLM solutions will help you in solving this problem.

You can manage mobility by creating a framework for remote and mobile work. Organizations can give their employees the tools that they need. These tools will ensure that your employees can work from anywhere in the world. MDLM solutions will help you in enabling communication and collaboration. It will help you in increasing the productivity of your employees. MDLM solutions will ensure that your mobile devices are secure. Your remote workers can access critical data without worrying about causing a security breach.

These are the main advantages of using MDLM solutions. It will help you in simplifying device management. All the activities will be managed by a single system. You can streamline your cost planning by using these solutions. It will give you real-time visibility of your mobile devices. You can track your mobile devices from procurement planning to deployment. It will help you in reusing your old devices. This will ensure that your organization will have a positive contribution towards issues like chip shortages. You can make your organization’s environment sustainable by using MDLM solutions.

Conclusion

The coronavirus pandemic has brought various changes to the modern workplace. It is important to keep up with these changes. Organizations are investing in device lifecycle management systems for dealing with various problems. You can achieve device lifecycle management by using a combination of managed processes, tools, and solutions. These solutions should help you in activities like warehousing, logistics, and shipping.

However, most organizations can’t create such a comprehensive and elaborate system. Thus, you should consider working with a good MSP. Experienced MSPs like Bleuwire will help you in managing remote workers and devices. They will help you in scaling your devices according to your business requirements. This will ensure that your end-users are satisfied. Bleuwire will also help you in creating an IT strategy for your business. They will ensure that your IT and business goals are aligned. Bleuwire can also help you in handling security issues associated with remote devices. This will ensure that you don’t need to worry about dealing with IT security issues. If you need more information regarding IT services, then you can contact Bleuwire.

Contact us today to learn about Bleuwire™ services and solutions in how we can help your business.