Evaluating Your Secure Mobile Working Solution

Measuring the impact of connectivity on productivity and costs

Introduction

A successful mobile deployment promises compelling benefits-increased worker productivity, lower operational costs, and improved customer service and support. As management, this success hinges on your ability to provide your mobile workforce with secure, real-time access to critical information and applications in the field. A well-executed mobile deployment empowers workers with the resources they need to be effective-resulting in faster business transactions, improved customer service, and ultimately, happier customers and increased revenue.

At the fulcrum of a successful mobile deployment is the lifeline between the mobile worker and central systems - secure connectivity. Typically this is a solution providing mobile workers with secure, reliable, remote access to network resources and information from virtually anywhere.

A cloud on the horizon is the significant drain on resources that threatens the ROI promise of your investment in mobile working through unexpected, and often unseen, usability problems that undermine cost/benefits. For your IT department, much of what goes on in within a mobile deployment is unseen. Mobile workers are constantly on the move, often tens to hundreds of miles away from their offices or headquarters. Their devices connect through networks outside of the IT department's direct control - cellular networks, or third-party Wi-Fi  access points.

As the saying on effective management has it - if you cannot measure, you cannot manage.

A challenge many IT organisations have is to gain a real understanding of what life is like for a mobile end user having to cope with technology demands, poor coverage and still achieve the goals for the job at hand

This paper taps into the experience of successful public sector deployments of mobile working to learn from them on how they evaluate their secure mobile working connectivity deployment with some straightforward tests to help gauge where there are opportunities to save money or improve services through eliminating connectivity pinch-points. It is broken down into key sections and each of those broken down again in two parts - an overview hitting the importance/benefit points where cost benefit may be getting squeezed out through the constraints of the current implementation, and a section that offers some simple tests that can be performed to surface any issues and opportunities for improvement that may exist,

Overview of key areas

Measuring the effectiveness of a connectivity solution can be broken down into the following sections:

• Security
• Roaming
• Applications persistence
• Application performance
• Policy controls
• Mobile Network Access controls
• Analytics reporting
• Management and control
• Scalability and reliability