How Device Management Can Help in Pandemic Preparedness

Pandemic preparedness is one of the most talked-about topics of 2020. Today, as a significant portion of the workforce is working from home and the field services industry is forced to adopt new guidelines, those responsible for ensuring business continuity must plan ahead. Thus, management organizations around the world are grooming leaders to plan pandemic-specific crisis responses and devise business-continuity plans.

Taking Action

Organizations of all sizes and in all industries have been hit hard by the coronavirus pandemic. There’s nothing they could have done to protect themselves completely from the impact, as every crisis is different. Since the scale of the damage became clear, business leaders have enacted contingency plans to ensure business continuity and security.

This is the time when leaders must revisit their crisis management plans and refine them to meet current goals. A mobile device management solution can be a strategic approach to ensure deployed devices are completely visible and centrally managed and maintained.

More and more companies across industries are beginning to recognize the value of mobile device management.

Review the Objectives

Business continuity managers must define the objectives of their crisis management plans. A crisis such as a pandemic requires leaders to prioritize objectives such as employee safety and wellness, continuity of essential business functions, and maintaining effective communication with stakeholders.

An MDM solution can help leaders do that through remote work and remote device management.

Ask the Right Questions

While the last few months of 2020 have seen a rise in trends such as automation, digitalization, and innovation, few trends have been as prominent as remote work and online education. With that, enterprise mobility management has become more important than ever. To ensure the continuity of these operations, business continuity planners must consider the following questions.

• What result will the economic downturn likely have on mobile technology going forward?
• How will the role of enterprise mobility strategies and tools evolve to help organizations, both now and in the long run?
• Is there external perimeter protection in place? How can organizations ensure the security of remote connectivity solutions and remote access to business resources?
• Do employees have the right technology to perform their jobs?
• What business functions can or cannot be performed remotely? Which essential business functions have to be performed on-site, and how many employees would be required to do that?

Test Preparedness

After deploying any solution, IT teams must test the efficacy of the solution as soon as possible. Leaders can run pilot programs to test if the program meets all objectives. Testing the solution on a limited scale will help you understand potential areas of improvement and refine the plan based on available information. It will also give you a chance to make sure that key stakeholders are trained in their roles in the plan.

Leaders should consider the following questions when evaluating a device management solution.

• Does it support essential features such as remote device enrollment, remote configuration, VPN, threat detection and protection, device encryption, and remote support?
• Is the device management solution compatible with all employee-owned or company-issued devices such as laptops, PCs, phones, and tablets? Does it support the necessary operating systems and platforms?
• Does the solution integrate well with your existing IT, administrative control, and application systems?

Communicate Effectively

Clear and consistent messaging is necessary for successful disaster recovery, and it also helps to preserve trust among employees and customers. Communicating with internal and external teams as well as customers about the recovery plan will ensure everyone is on the same page. Evaluating and transitioning to third-party conferencing tools (such as Zoom) and virtual applications will help maintain a sense of collaboration.

When remotely accessing business resources, IT teams must spread awareness about various forms of phishing attempts that employees can fall prey to. Employees must look out for unusual emails and accept official communication only from identified sources.

Mitigate Risks

When the entire workforce (employees, contractors, business partners, and third-party vendors) has legitimate access to the organization’s assets, insider threats increase significantly. Some examples of insider threats include data theft, data breaches, financial fraud, and exposing sensitive information such as Personally Identifiable Information (PII) or Intellectual Property (IP). MDM solutions can help mitigate insider threats and risks arising from within the organization itself. The granular policy control features found in an MDM solution, such as advanced data loss protection and remote access management, minimizes the potential risk of insider threats.

Here are six top ways that device management solutions can help organizations prepare for a pandemic-like situation or a similar crisis.

• Quickly set up remote teams – Device management solutions such as a UEM tool can be used for bulk device provisioning and onboarding. IT teams can quickly and easily onboard devices in bulk without any user action. A robust UEM tool has the capacity to handle teams of various sizes and can scale up efficiently as required.
• Secure devices, apps, and data – MDM solutions can help organizations manage devices remotely and configure one or multiple mobile devices at once with applications, account settings, Wi-Fi, VPN, and other criteria. These solutions also allow IT teams to automate and schedule routine IT tasks and enforce relevant security policies remotely across devices.
• Manage if your team is on-task – When an entire workforce is working remotely, it’s common for managers to worry about the productivity of their teams. MDM solutions can help teams thrive and succeed by only allowing access to team management and productivity applications.
• Manage a mix of multiple OS-based devices – A comprehensive MDM tool can help the IT team manage devices based on multiple operating systems. This, in turn, reduces device management complexities by providing holistic visibility of the entire device inventory from a single console.
• Help IT teams provide remote support – Device control options such as remote screencast and screen sharing provide IT admins complete control over devices where they can guide and help employees resolve device issues remotely.
• Manage compliance – Device management solutions can help maintain compliance by enforcing policies that mandate patch management, OS updates, antivirus scan status, minimum password complexity levels, and firewall configuration.

Conclusion

Following these steps can help organizations prepare for most crises (not just a pandemic). Technology can help build an actionable plan that can mitigate the risks of a pandemic.