Companies Deploy Mobile Content Management Tools
Innovative IT organizations understand that content rules when it comes to mobility today. That’s why aircraft management company FlightWorks embraced secure content management more than two years ago, a move that results in major time savings.
Johan Segring, vice president of business and information systems for the Kennesaw, Ga., company, says FlightWorks uses AirWatch Secure Content Locker to lock down proprietary flight information on iPad devices. “It used to take our people 20 to 40 hours a month to update the flight manuals on the old paper-based system,” he says. “Now the team can do updates in a matter of minutes.”
Segring says the team can now focus on more value-added services for its corporate jet and government customers.
Like FlightWorks, many companies in heavily regulated industries such as aerospace, financial services and healthcare are among the early adopters of mobile content management, says Chris Silva, research director for mobile and client computing for Gartner.
“For the most part, it’s still only 20 to 30 percent of the organizations going beyond basic MDM, but that will change as the people closest to the day-to-day work demand that secure document management is integrated into workflows so they can run the apps on mobile devices,” Silva says.
The percentage of organizations that push apps to their employees who are using customized applications
SOURCE: Fiberlink, “MaaS360 Mobile Metrics,” May 2014
All Access Pass
Art Alexion, enterprise communications engineer at Resources for Human Development, a human services nonprofit in Philadelphia, uses MaaS360 from IBM/Fiberlink for its 1,500 mobile users.
RHD has enabled secure content management for the organization’s 300 tablets, most of which are iPads.
“We use a mobile access gateway set up by Fiberlink to do secure content sharing so that our mobile field workers can access data on our organization’s internal servers,” Alexion says. “It may be a spreadsheet for a budget manager, case notes for a mobile clinician or a letter by an executive, but users can access the data securely on their iPads.”
Content Management Capabilities
Chris Silva, research director for mobile and client computing at Gartner, describes three roles of secure content management in an enterprise mobile management (EMM) package:
Secure Storage: A client application enables users to store content securely on a mobile device. The EMM can enforce authentication, file sharing and restrict copy-and-paste functions.
Content Push: Along with receiving content via email, EMMs can push content and oversee it as needed; for example, by controlling document versions, alerting users to new files and flagging a content expiration date.
Content Access: A back-end repository serves up content to mobile devices. Capabilities include support for specific repositories such as SharePoint or Documentum, restricting downloads while roaming and audit logging to track who accesses or downloads files.
