EMM vs MDM: Insights from a MobileIron deployment

Which is best – enterprise mobility management or mobile device management? For ICT supplier Bamboo, the answer is definitely the former, explains its managing director Lorrin White

Anyone who has worked in ICT for a while will know it is almost impossible to go a day without using an acronym or initialism, so I apologise in advance for the offenders in this article. But when you are asked to compare enterprise mobility management (EMM) with mobile device management (MDM), you’ll appreciate the use of such abbreviations to save on the syllables.

In ICT, you need to walk the walk before you can talk the talk. Trust is shattered if you can’t talk from experience. So, before we offered EMM to our customers, we tested various solutions before we eventually chose and implemented MobileIron into our own systems. We wanted to know to what extent EMM really is a step up from MDM. What are the differences between the two, what are their respective limitations, and when do the additional security benefits of EMM outweigh those of MDM? We also sought to anticipate the types of questions we would receive from our customers: Do I really need EMM if I already have MDM? Is it complicated to deploy? What are the potential teething problems? And so on.