This scenario is probably quite familiar: your colleague has sent you a PowerPoint presentation to review before your team’s presentation. You decide you’ll look at it on your tablet during your subway commute. When you open the file, all you see is garbled font. What about those images your co-worker spent so long creating? They don’t appear.
Mobile device users have been frustrated that their smartphones or tablets make it difficult for them to collaborate on a document. Viewing, annotating, editing, and sharing are activities that don’t seem to work as well on mobile devices. Many app developers have attempted to solve those problems with apps that make viewing, annotating, editing, and sharing easy. Those apps represent another issue, though – none of them are built with enterprise security in mind. How do you enable employees to collaborate effectively yet securely?
Securing Mobile Collaboration: Two Approaches
Currently, companies have two paths they can take to enabling secure mobile collaboration. The first path is to choose a solution that offers all of the capabilities users need in order to collaborate efficiently and effectively with their mobile devices.
Doesn’t the first path sound perfect? You might be wondering why anyone would bother implementing any other solution. Here’s the problem: there aren’t that many solution providers that offer a secure mobile collaboration solution. And you might discover that the “perfect solution” lacks an important capability such as annotation.
That’s why many companies wind up along the second path. Instead of implementing one solution that does everything (or almost everything), they deploy multiple apps through an app store. They also use an enterprise file sync and share solution.
The second approach has its drawbacks, too. Having to use several apps in order to achieve the simple tasks of viewing, annotating, editing, and sharing has a negative impact on user experience. Furthermore, IT administrators must ensure that they have added all of the correct apps to the app store. For example, certain firms require the use of watermarks on documents to prevent data leaks. As such, IT administrators need to be certain that they have that app available before users even need it.
Collaborating Securely through Mobile Devices: An Emerging Field
Although mobile devices have gone from being a nice-to-have to a critical need for the enterprise, they’re still a maturing technology. Humans continue to test the limits of their capabilities.
Secure mobile collaboration is in its infancy as well. It will take solution providers time to develop effective, efficient approaches to collaborating through mobile devices in a secure manner.
What can businesses do in the meantime? They should choose a solution that offers the best possible user experience while ensuring that security is a top priority. Selecting a solution that will integrate with current infrastructure investments is also crucial. Becoming locked in to a single vendor isn’t a good idea, because it doesn’t give you the flexibility to choose a better solution when one comes along.
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