One of the biggest challenges for IT managers is maintaining a fleet of mobile devices, often which are owned not by the company but by employees. The issue is that with a BYOD fleet of smartphones, the software of individual phones is often out of sync. Fortunately there are several patch management software options that can help with mobile device management.
Patch management is one of the biggest issues facing an IT head, but with good patch management software maintaining a BYOD fleet of phones should be no problem at all. That is a good thing since BYOD is a growing business model. It makes sense since research suggests that over 230 million people over age 13 in the United States use a mobile device, with 65 million people owning a smartphone. And that is only going to grow, with ABI Research saying that upwards of 1 billion smartphones will enter the market in the next five years.
Many of those phones will be iPhones owned by employees, which is why many patch management software options focus on iPhone management and iPhone security. Fortunately there are encryption and authentication protocols designed to be used with Byod policies to ensure employee compliance with company security requirements. These BYOD business models rely heavily on cloud based architecture, ensuring that the phones can be updated from anywhere at anytime.
This eliminates one of the biggest former challenges in maintaining a BYOD or a company owned fleet of phones, which is the need to physically service the devices. That obviously slows things down and makes it inconvenient for the IT manager. Having to physically handle what could be hundreds of devices on a regular basis would be a huge waste of time. With good patch management software, the need to physically handle any device should be relatively rare.
Patch management software is not just a luxury investment, it is a necessary part of doing business in the 21st century. It is growing nearly impossible to do business efficiently without the use of a smartphone, but the fact is that smartphones also pose security risks. That is why software is needed to help manage them. A company of just a handful of people might be able to get away with not using management software, but for larger companies it is a game changing choice. The initial cost of the software will be repaid in full many times over thanks to saved man hours.
