The need to manage corporate devices across business environments is greater than ever, as the volume and frequency of information we share with one another continues to grow. Whether you manage Android or iOS smartphones, you’ve probably come across a range of seemingly interchangeable acronyms for this practice.
For years, we called this strategy Mobile Device Management (MDM). It referred to the administration of mobile devices, such as Android and iOS smartphones, via software.
MDM soon spawned off a slew of similar strategies, including:
- Mobile Content Management (MCM) : A content management strategy that allows IT enterprises to share, distribute, and collaborate on business data.
- Mobile Application Management (MAM): A strategy to lock down enterprise apps and their data, but not the device.
- Mobile Information Management (MIM) : A device-agnostic security strategy that involves keeping sensitive data encrypted and allowing only approved applications to access or transmit it.
To cut down on confusion across the industry, in 2014, Gartner adopted the term Enterprise Mobility Management (EMM) as a means of encapsulating all of these practises. And so, in theory, an EMM consists of an MDM and a MAM.
EMM covers most enterprise mobile device administration. Yet there’s been a growing need to find a universal management solution for all digital corporate data. The natural evolution was Unified Endpoint Management (UEM) systems.
UEMs are essentially EMMs that are designed to manage devices across a variety of platforms, including corporate phones, laptops, PCs, printers, and even wearables, creating a more secure environment.
And so the way to make sense of all of these is to think of an MDM as a subset of an EMM, which is a subset of a UEM (see diagram above).
No matter which strategy you decide to adopt for your enterprise, Samsung Knox IT solutions should be a part of your toolkit.
