How Mobile Device Management Helps Small Businesses

The benefits of mobile device management (MDM) for small businesses and startups have been well proven: the centralized management of phones, tablets, and laptops increases reliability, security, and the resulting productivity produces measurable improvements to business outcomes. This is especially evident for organizations that rely on remote workforces.

This guide explains why MDM for small business helps to manage, secure, and monitor mobile devices so that the data on them is protected, and that they do not fail at critical moments.

What mobile device management does for small businesses

MDM is the software tool used to remotely manage mobile devices. This includes iOS and Android phones and tablets, as well as Windows and macOS laptops. MDM can also be deployed to manage desktop PCs for remote workers, and is not limited by form-factor.

MDM is increasingly critical to the success of small businesses. It enables the enforcement of security policies, remote control (and optional remote access), the management of apps and updates, as well as the ongoing monitoring of device status and health.

This helps small businesses and startups in the following ways:

• Devices can be kept secure and compliant, with the latest security patches.
• Apps can be remotely managed, so staff always have access to the tools they need to be productive (and blocked from installing those that they don’t need).
• Reliability is improved as device health can be monitored, allowing a proactive approach to support and security.
• Sensitive company data and private information can be kept safe with the enforcement of device encryption, as well as remote lock and remote wipe.

Key benefits of MDM for small businesses

Different MDM solutions offer different features, with some targeting narrower use cases or offering additional features like multi-tenancy, allowing for the support of multiple organizations within the same MDM platform.

When choosing MDM tools and designing your mobile device strategy, you should make sure that each provides the following benefits to your small business, as well as being flexible enough to address your unique requirements.

Streamlined onboarding and control

For small businesses that aren’t deploying fleets of devices, zero-touch provisioning (that automatically enrolls devices out-of-the-box) is generally not a necessity.

However, the initial configuration of the MDM platform, and the process of adding devices to MDM, should be straightforward and integrate with the tools vendors provide for this (for example, Apple Business Manager and Android Enterprise).

Improved security

MDM should let you set policies on end-user devices that enforce security features such as complex passcodes, biometric authentication, and device encryption. Remote lock and remote wipe should also be available to prevent devices from being used by unauthorized parties.

One of the primary reasons businesses adopt MDM is for its security advantages, so that proprietary data is protected and compliance is maintained, as sensitive customer data often winds up on mobile devices via email, collaboration, and productivity tools.

Centralized device management

Small businesses need to be able to work with limited resources. IT should not waste valuable productive time with complex, fragmented toolchains.

MDM should simplify device management, rather than becoming part of a complex apparatus, by providing cross-platform device management from a single interface, automatically configuring new devices and applying policies across all devices, and reducing manual administration.

Support for remote and hybrid work

Work from home and hybrid work has become favored by some small businesses, allowing them to reduce the need for office space and centralized infrastructure.

These distributed environments can be hard to govern and support, however. MDM helps solve this by allowing you to ensure oversight is maintained over devices, wherever they are located, and ensure they are always fit-for-purpose.

Enable the responsible use of personal devices/BYOD

A significant benefit of remote and hybrid work for small businesses and startups is bring-your-own-device (BYOD). When employees use their personal devices for work, businesses can reduce the costs of purchasing devices. The biggest downside of this is the lack of management and security: without oversight, end users are less likely to keep their devices patched and enable security features.

MDM can provide this, but care must be taken to work with end-users to establish the level of control they are comfortable with your organization having over their private devices, and create separate policies for them. Otherwise, they may elect not to use their own devices for work purposes.

Reduced downtime and operational risk

These individual positive outcomes result in the broader business benefits of reduced downtime, risk, as well as improved productivity.

MDM promotes a proactive approach to device management that can prevent incidents before they impact users, enabling fast response times and helping maintain device performance and availability. This reduces long-term IT costs (remediation is usually more costly overall than prevention), and ensures valuable employee time is not wasted by frustrating mobile device issues.

Real-world use cases for small businesses

The effectiveness of MDM for small businesses is regularly demonstrated in the day-to-day operations of small businesses:

• When an employee loses a company phone, the device can be remotely locked or wiped, so that the data on it cannot be accessed.
• The security of mobile devices used by remote workers is maintained, preventing them from being used as a stepping stone to your company’s internal resources.
• Remote access allows you to support users, wherever they are, and solve problems quickly so they can get back to work.
• Updates can be centrally managed and deployed without user interaction to maintain patch compliance and protect against zero-day exploits before they impact your business.

Is MDM necessary for small businesses?

If you only manage a handful of devices, MDM may not be necessary. This is especially the case with a small number of employees who can take ownership of keeping their own devices up-to-date and following cybersecurity best practices.

However, if you deal with sensitive data or staff who are not security-conscious, MDM offers numerous benefits, provided it avoids adding significant management overheads. It also makes sense to adopt an MDM and establish practices if you are intending to grow your organization, so that the groundwork for a secure infrastructure is in place before you begin to scale.

Cost considerations for small businesses and startups choosing an MDM

Subscription-based MDM addresses cost concerns, charging per-device so that pricing scales with your usage, meaning you always get the full value out of your investment.

Not investing in IT security and reliability is a significant risk, and can induce further costs in both the short- and long-term: security incidents cause compliance and operational issues, unmanaged devices’ configurations drift, and unreliable devices impact productivity.

Working with a managed service provider (MSP) instead of managing your own devices

An MSP takes over your day-to-day IT management tasks, leveraging their experience to provide you with IT infrastructure that is highly secure and available.

Even for startups, working with an MSP has several benefits:

• Your team can focus on growing your business rather than time-consuming IT maintenance
• Experts handle security, following best practices for systems hardening
• Suitable MDM and other tools are chosen for you based on your requirements and the MSPs technical experience
• MSPs can maintain documentation so that you can fully understand how your infrastructure works, where your vital data is, and why certain decisions were made, and vitally, where responsibilities lay

Costs can often also be lower, as you don’t need your own 24/7 IT technicians, and MSPs can operate on an economy of scale. You should choose an MSP that offers MDM, as well as other IT services that you will require as your business grows.

MDM works best as part of a unified IT management platform

Small businesses require more than just MDM to ensure the reliability and security of their IT operations. Mobile devices rely on servers, network infrastructure (including Wi-Fi endpoints and IoT), cloud resources, and SaaS to be useful alongside other end-user devices like workstations, kiosks, and ePOS.

Adopting separate tools to manage all of these devices and services is inefficient and leads to visibility and security gaps. NinjaOne provides a unified IT platform that combines MDM, remote monitoring and management (RMM), network monitoring, backup, and SaaS tools into a single platform that is centrally managed, giving growing businesses all the tools needed to ensure their IT infrastructure enables growth.