Today’s business environment is no longer just a drab gray office setting filled with workstations lining the wall. The office is the coffee shop across the street, or the airport lobby while you’re waiting for your plane to arrive. It’s the client’s office while you’re out on a business trip, or the venue for a business conference where you make valuable connections and exchange contact information. The office has gone mobile, and your business needs to adapt to this change.
We’ll discuss a few major ways how your business can take full advantage of this mobile revolution, and how you can safely and securely do so without putting your business at risk.
Mobile Applications
Many of the services that you use on a daily basis have mobile app equivalents that can be of great value to your business. We’re talking about productivity suites like Microsoft Office 365 and Google’s G-Suite, as well as voice chat systems like Skype for Mobile and Google Hangouts--solutions that you may have been able to use on your desktop, but could never dream of using on your mobile device. As business grows more demanding, company executives are looking to get more out of their mobile device, and having near-constant access to their critical assets while out of the office is a great boon that cannot be ignored.
Mobile Devices
Your workstation might be tethered to the wall outlet, but your smartphone and laptop certainly aren’t. With mobile devices on your side, you can stay productive even while out of the office by using mobile versions of the same solutions. This offers your business the flexibility to work from anywhere at any time, while also providing a productivity boost that’s often needed to stay one step ahead of deadlines. Furthermore, you give your team the ability to get their work done on their own terms, which can be empowering in its own right.
The Cloud
Similar to how you access mobile applications while out and about, you can use the cloud to store and access data while out of the office, among other things. You can host just about anything in the cloud, including your business’s servers, workstation infrastructure, data storage, and even applications. All you need is a connected device. After that, the rest is history.
Staying Safe
Going mobile comes with certain side-effects--chief of all is the security problems associated with accessing data while out of the safety of the office. Your in-house network is secure from external threats, but hackers will use public Wi-Fi connections to steal unsecured data while it’s in transit. A Virtual Private Network (VPN) encrypts data that’s sent to and received by your device, protecting it from being spied on by any onlookers on a public network. Furthermore, you should be using a comprehensive Bring Your Own Device policy to ensure that any devices accessing sensitive information while out of the office can whitelist or blacklist applications, section off data on a per-user basis, and be capable of remotely wiping any data stored.
Grove Networks can equip your business with the means to take your business on the move without putting your data at risk. To learn more about VPNs or BYOD, reach out to us at (305) 448-6126.
