If you are not new to the mobility management space, you would have come across terms like MDM, EMM, UEM, etc. Knowing the difference between these management techniques is really important as it is necessary for you to identify the right solution to suit your organization’s needs. So, let’s see what each of them exactly means and offers.
MDM
Mobile Device Management (MDM) allows you to manage and secure corporate or employee-owned mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets deployed across multiple OS platforms. Enrolled devices can be configured to address company policies and requirements. Devices can be locked, tracked and monitored remotely from the MDM console.
Other major services that an MDM solution should offer include:
- Ability to enforce security policies and perform real-time monitoring and reporting
- Perform a remote wipe when a device is lost or stolen
- Enforce strong passwords for mobile device access
- Mandate encryption
- Prevent unauthorized access to a device through a remote lock
- Avoid unsecured Wi-Fi and Bluetooth
- Enforce the use of VPN connections between the mobile devices and the enterprise server
- Apply policies to restrict usage and access to certain features
and so on.
In short, the main objective of MDM is to give organizations secured control over their devices.
EMM
As MDM solutions functioned at the device level it became difficult to break through the challenges arose with BYOD(Bring Your Own Devices) and COPE (Corporate Owned Personally Enabled) trends in the organizations. Sensitive corporate data on employees’ devices had to be secured without compromising their privacy. So, MDM transformed into a more comprehensive solution, EMM.
Enterprise Mobility Management (EMM) encompasses technologies to manage apps and content with stringent security. Generally, EMM offers everything that MDM can perform. Other major components of EMM include:
- Mobile Application Management (MAM) — Allow organizations to control access to applications and data associated with it instead of controlling the entire physical device. You can seamlessly deploy and update in-house and play store apps over-the-air. It provides in-depth management of apps restricting malicious apps, configuring and removing apps according to the company policy and even forcing devices to work in a purpose-specific mode known as kiosk mode with one or more apps allotted by the organization. Another important part of MAM is containerization which separates work-related content from personalized data by placing them in a separate virtual container.
- Containerization — Though a part of MAM, containerization has vital importance especially in cases where the devices have both work and personal data. Containerization establishes separate, encrypted containers on personal devices — a secure area on the device that keeps business data isolated from everything else on the device. Along with securing corporate apps and data, this approach also ensures that organizations can’t interact with personal data on the device. On Android devices, containerization could be achieved by enrolling them in the Android Enterprise program and deploying a work profile container. For iOS devices, data flow between the managed work apps and personal apps could be controlled by applying a set of restrictions.
- Mobile Content Management (MCM) — It is all about the remote distribution, management, and collaboration of critical business content. Any means of content sharing can be managed and secured access to documents can be granted. Encryption can be mandated to protect the data stored on the devices and thereby unauthorized access to the data can be prevented.
- Mobile Security Management (MSM) — It is much like MDM and refers to the best practices to secure your mobile devices. In addition to the security features offered by MDM, Mobile Security Management adopts a much stronger security strategy to provide application level and data level protection. For application-level security, unwanted apps can be restricted, and kiosk mode can be enabled. You can also analyze and audit the information regarding all the applications installed on the devices. Data security can be ensured by enforcing device disk encryption and strong device password. For web-based protection unsecured websites could be blacklisted.
- Mobile Expense Management (MEM) — Used to track mobile communication expenses and audit mobile data usage. Can set up data usage limits and restrict network connectivity once the limit is reached. App-wise data usage restrictions can also be configured.
- Identity and access management — Refers to the process of managing and defining roles and privileges to individuals for accessing corporate resources to ensure that the right person has the right access. It also controls how employees use corporate apps and data. It is actually to mitigate the security threats from employees while providing good user experience. For authorization, strong passwords and two-factor authentications could be enforced. Network services like Wi-Fi, VPN and emails can be authenticated with certificates.
UEM
Unified Endpoint Management (UEM) approach consolidates the management of all endpoints including smartphones, tablets, laptops, wearables, TVs and IoT devices providing a single pane to manage devices, apps, and data. It is an evolution and combination of MDM and EMM along with the capabilities of traditional client management tools. This centralized platform with a multi-device architecture helps you remove the hassle of complicated integrations among different tools on multiple platforms.
UEM solutions have all the capabilities of its predecessors including device management, application management, security management, content management, expense management, kiosk management and so on. Taking management a few steps further it offers other enhanced features like no-touch deployment of devices under different platforms to make them business-ready over-the-air. It has seamless business integrations to boost productivity and can manage any of the business scenarios: BYOD or COPE.
MDM vs EMM vs UEM — Summarized
So, to sum up, MDM, EMM, and UEM are the different evolutionary stages of mobility management and addresses the security and privacy concerns raised as a part of the modern business trends. Simply put, the main difference between these solutions lie in their management scopes. MDM focusses on the basic management of mobile devices by leveraging device-level policies and putting security protocols to provision these devices. EMM is a much comprehensive approach which includes all aspects of managing enterprise mobility including MAM, MCM, MSM, MEM, Identity and Access management along with MDM. And finally, UEM implies a coherent mechanism to integrate the management of all endpoints along with mobile devices into a single platform.
After knowing the lines of difference between these management tools, it is quite easy to determine the right solution for your mobility needs. The point is to analyze, identify and figure out your organization’s needs and choose the one that’s best suited for you.
No matter which management strategy is right for you, Hexnode can help you with that!
