Tag: enterprise mobility solutions
Cloud and Mobility: The two pillars to recession-proof your business
- Introduction
- How Does the Recovery Shape of The Coronavirus Recession Look?
- What is a recession-proof business?
- What can business leaders do now?
- How Do Enterprise Mobility Solutions Help in The Current Crisis?
- Five Unique business benefits of enterprise mobility during recession!
- Recession-proof your business by embracing Cloud
- Cloud is not a future aspiration rather an urgent mandate
- How can you capture the full value of the Cloud to recession-proof your business?
- Staying Afloat Despite the Crisis
- Are You Keeping Up with The New Normal?
Introduction
In just a matter of weeks, the COVID-19 pandemic has chopped off nearly a third of the global market cap triggering panic across the world and shaking the confidence of investors. According to an analysis by the World Bank, the “coronavirus disease pandemic and ensuing lockdowns in several parts of the world have led to a recession unmatched in eight decades.”
The coronavirus-inflicted recession which started unfolding itself in February and March of this year has left the macroeconomic landscape in a state of dilemma. For the past six months, business leaders have been trying to navigate shattered expectations and continued uncertainty forcing them to rapidly shift their expectations for the future. During the Great Recession of 2007 to 2009, unemployment soared to almost 10 percent by January 2009. From then on, recession-watchers have been equipped for the reversal of fortunes.
The economic distress caused by coronavirus may be the trigger that leads to a prolonged slump. If so, it is time for workers, investors, and entrepreneurs to seek refuge in recession-proof business practices. This article explains why it is the perfect time to recession-proof your business through cloud and mobility trends.
How Does the Recovery Shape of The Coronavirus Recession Look?
Recession is defined as a significant decline in economic activity lasting more than just a few months and is evident in decreased levels of real income, real GDP, industrial production, employment, and wholesale-retail sales. According to the forecast by the World Bank, the global economy will shrink by 5.2% by the end of this year culminating in the deepest recession since the second world war. The World Bank Prospects Group Director Ayhan Kose noted, “the Covid-19 recession is singular in many respects and is likely to be the deepest one in the advanced economies…The current episode has already seen by far the fastest and the steepest downgrades in global growth forecasts on record. If the past is any guide, there may be further growth downgrades in store, implying that policymakers may need to be ready to employ additional measures to support activity.”
Thankfully, all recessions including the present recession will not last forever. The economy will reopen at some point and start growing again. Unfortunately, the uncertainty of the times makes recovery shapes more widely dispersed. Recovery shapes are not about speed but more about the eventual return to pre-crisis levels. Therefore, the expectation for the path of recovery is hotly debatable. Perhaps we can confidently say that full return to the pre-crisis stage looks ever more challenging with the passage of time.
This raises a few pertinent questions:
- Can any business be recession-proofed?
- What can business leaders do?
- How do enterprise mobility solutions help in the current crisis?
- How can they leverage technology to recession-proof their business?
Read more: Navigate Business Impact Of COVID-19 With These Hot Technologies
What is a recession-proof business?
Recession-proof businesses are defined as industries that can stay afloat during terrible economic times or somehow survive unscathed or a business that has a better chance of riding out a recession.
What can business leaders do now?
Debatably, six months into the corona crisis, economic outcomes are not quite certain. Yet, business leaders can take these steps to prepare for the next phase of the corona crisis.
1. Prepare early
A key to surviving any recession is to act as early as possible. The willingness to make strategic and necessary moves decides if a business is weathering the storm of economic downturn or is sinking their ship.
2. Take stock
As economies reopen with varying degrees of success, now is the right time for business leaders to take stock and to reallocate resources appropriately. Take a realistic look at what is possible for your business and accept what is not possible. This is an important step towards creating goals that fit the new normal.
3. Build resilience
COVID-19 has demonstrated an immense power to surprise and upend well thought out assumptions about how business works and who is likely to win. Businesses should thus actively prepare by creating optionality to maneuver. You may have to shift your mindset from growth to survival.
4. Capture advantage
Leaders must leverage all technological trends to reinvent their superpower. Explore crisis-specific solutions to adapt to the new normal faster than ever before.
Read more: Fingent’s Response to COVID-19 Business Implications
How Do Enterprise Mobility Solutions Help in The Current Crisis?
Enterprise mobility solution services basically refer to solutions for businesses that enable employees to use their personal mobile devices securely from anywhere to enhance productivity for the company. For example, an employee should be able to access any uploaded data at any given point through any device that’s available such as a Smartphone, Laptop, or Tablet, and carry out tasks required by the company and thus increase productivity.
What does it offer?
Enterprise mobility offers employees flexibility, freedom, and choice. It can make a huge positive impact on their job satisfaction while increasing their work hours. Most businesses practice enterprise mobility in some way. Along with work flexibility, it helps businesses to maximize profits and reduce costs.
Five Unique business benefits of enterprise mobility during recession!
During the recession, enterprise mobility offers endless opportunities that help broaden the sphere of your customers and your business.
1. Improved employee productivity
Mobile applications mechanize paper-driven procedures to streamline work processes. This brilliant approach enhances information exactness and grants clients access to updated and often real-time data. During situations such as a lockdown, it allows companies to build propelled functionalities improving employee productivity.
2. Reduces operational cost
Since the implementation of enterprise mobility enables employees to work from home, it is bound to minimize the cost of your infrastructure drastically. Also, if it becomes necessary for some employees to come to the office, mobility solutions can enable workspace collaboration for your mobile environment across multiple platforms and devices.
3. Efficient collaboration
When many employees work on the same project, they will have to coordinate with each other regularly. With enterprise mobility solutions they can easily share data and important information through mobile devices, update their work progress, and collaborate continuously.
4. Data security
Security is one of the most important requirements of any enterprise. Enterprise mobility management offers businesses the necessary levels of data security and risk management allowing a secure communication medium.
5. Provides customer satisfaction
Customer service is the top business priority for all enterprises. Enterprise mobility facilitates quicker customer service increasing the customers’ trust in your business.
Read more: Enterprise Mobility Apps for Faster Business Growth
Recession-proof your business by embracing Cloud
Though cloud computing was increasingly adopted by large companies and startups in the last few years, the work-from-home culture during the pandemic has highlighted the critical advantages of using cloud-based solutions. Cloud integration services have open, continuous assistance, and discounts for their customers and prospective clients.
Internal cloud services can provide resources and orchestrate the entire application stack across different servers. The external cloud services can easily leverage the scale of application and infrastructure while providing an enhanced computing environment. This way, cloud solutions create several opportunities for both service providers and clients. It eliminates unnecessary spending of resources for work, successfully reducing the costs involved.
Read more: Top 6 Reasons Why You Should Move to a Cloud-Hosted ERP
Cloud is not a future aspiration rather an urgent mandate
Though the concept of cloud is not new, most enterprises remain in on-premise data centers. The current pandemic has reinforced the fact that the cloud is an urgent mandate at the heart of all businesses. You need an intelligent cloud journey that balances speed and value. Each migration should be started by mapping out the journey and determining how the cloud will empower the overall business strategy and goal. Once you migrate the majority of your workload to the cloud, you will be able to realize the full business value of the change. You will see how it makes your business resilient, efficient, and customer-focused.
How can you capture the full value of the Cloud to recession-proof your business?
1. Migrate at scale
The first step would be to align the entire enterprise including strong leadership from the top to provide direction. Second, focus constantly on realizing value throughout the migration process without getting stuck in a pattern of aimless experimentation. Finally, weigh out the cost savings against application complexity, data-location compliance requirements, and legacy needs. Realize the potential value and innovation that can be unlocked through cloud optimization.
2. Modernize
For your business to work with speed and agility, you need to think comprehensively about the data flow across all your systems. Hence, carefully consider your modernizing needs and long-term process that are based on a solid application discovery assessment. While planning a strategy, take into account where the organization is headed and why. Doing this will make you a cloud-first enterprise.
3. Optimize
Constantly monitor and optimize cost and capacity, manage consumption and performance, and leverage the right services from cloud providers to maximize the value/performance ratio and sustainability.
4. Innovate
Since the cloud enables experimentation at speed, try out several ideas at the same time and point to the right one quickly and securely. Gain access to cutting-edge technologies by collaborating with your partners.
Read more: Cloud Service Models Saas, IaaS, Paas – Choose the Right One for Your Business
Mobility is in the midst of a golden run, with smartphones and tablets the medium of choice for the always harried and on-the-move enterprise users. Paradoxically, the mobile boom has made life difficult for enterprise mobility solution developers. Even as the vibrant mobility development space offers plenty of opportunities, a plethora of challenges stump developers.
The Challenge of Emerging Technologies
Mobile developers struggle to play catch up, to release updates and make their apps relevant in the face of fast-paced developments in OS and hardware technology. The following are a few cases in point.
- The sheer volumes of iOS APIs unleashed in recent times overwhelms even the most competent app developer.
- Enterprise developers estimating which new tooling features might align to their apps’ features are now a routine occurrence. More often than not, developers miss the update and scurry to fix the code.
The pace of change compounds the misery. Where developers rolled out updates in 30 days before, they find the need to update the code in just one or two days, or else run the risk of their apps turning dysfunctional.
There is no shortcut to solve the imbroglio. The best developers remain on tenterhooks, tracking emerging technologies and maturing standards, and regard app development as a constant exercise rather than as one-off projects.
The Challenge of Device Fragmentation
The hopelessly fragmented digital marketplace, a result of the constant treadmill of new devices and OS, compound the misery of the app developer. Today’s app developers are virtually working blind, not knowing their target platform.
The sheer number of devices in the market makes it virtually impossible to test the app for all usage scenario permutations and combinations. Cloud-based simulated testing, clearly the future of app testing, however, is just taking off. As things stand, developers face a Hobson’s choice on which device to invest for testing their apps.
Until not too long ago, enterprise mobility solution developers were immune from this challenge, as they could focus their efforts on the limited number of platforms and OS used by the enterprise. However, Bring-Your-Own-Device (BYOD) policies now force enterprise apps to support a variety of mobile devices. Gartner predicts half of all employers to require employees to BYOD, by 2017.
While there is no shortcut to testing the app on multiple browsers and multiple carrier connections, developers can optimize their development and testing efforts by:
- Targeting the most likely platforms in which the app would run.
- Employing consistent and reliable development practices across all leading platforms, ensuring consistency in look and feel.
- Creating globally recognizable but culturally sensitive graphics.
App developers also need to be on guard against the focus on usability distracting them from testing other crucial elements, such as whether their apps are battery hogs.
UX Challenges
User Experience (UX) makes or breaks an app. Forrester estimates about 64% of employees not using enterprise mobile apps, owing to poor UX. Enterprise users, hard pressed for time, always value simplicity. The challenge for app developers is to pack in the required functionality, and ensure the app meets the required aesthetics related to corporate branding, while still ensuring simplicity.
Opting for a responsive design to attain mastery of the cross-platform scenario is a good first step, and a minimalist approach to design is a good second step. However, success ultimately depends on how best the screen real estate is put to use. Intuitive use of icons often creates a useful and natural mobile UX. Equipping the app with analytics to track engagement metrics, monitoring crash logs, and a structured feedback mechanism help developers fine tune their apps, but app developers still; have a challenge in setting up these processes.
Security Challenges
The fragmented digital marketplace raises big security challenges as well. Each operating system has its own custom architecture, and different mobile platforms offer varying degrees of support for securing the data stored on the device. Another challenge is reconciling the actual level of security needed.
It is always a good idea to encrypt data and keep it in a secure container inside the device. Another best practice is integration with the enterprise’s LDAP directory, to ensure proper authentication and single-sign-on (SSO) across all enterprises apps. Opting for server-side validation, instead of client side validation prevents complex validations from dragging down the app to a crawl. However, many mobility solution developers forget security is a flexible thing, and blindly apply such best practices across-the-board. While multi-factor authentication is understandable in banking apps that facilitate bill pay, the same level of security will be an overkill, and a big put-off for an informational app.
Challenges Related to Content Management and Data Access
Access to corporate data, often sensitive in nature, is critical for most enterprise mobile solutions. Such data usually resides in a backend database. Developers need to decide on how best to access such data, and whether to store the accessed data in the device’s native file system, for offline access. Either way, ensuring seamless sync of data between the app and the backend is a challenge.
Enterprise mobility solution developers need to sit down with business managers and understand the business process, to get data access right. For instance, a field salesperson may need to download inventory data when meeting a client, in a place where there is no network. In such an eventuality, the app would also require not just data storage capabilities, but also synchronization capabilities to update the inventory once the salesperson returns online. The app also needs to understand when a connection is dropped, to roll back to its last-known data.
A related challenge is bundling all diverse content type, be it videos, images, animation, or text, into monolithic expansion files, as required by many app stores.
Challenge of Development Technology
HTML5-CSS3 based cross-platform development generally offers advantages in terms of cost, reduced time-to-market, and portability across platforms. However, HTML5 is not without its drawbacks either, such as limitations in local data storage, security concerns, and more. Many developers opt for native, platform specific development for better UX and superior application performance, but such advantages often come at a high cost, and increase time-to-market considerably. Enterprise mobility solution developers have a task on their hand, not just identifying a development technology, but trying to get the best of both worlds.
Understanding user requirements to the last detail is the key to deciding on the development approach. There is no workaround to technical competency in doing the job well, regardless of the approach chosen.
The success of enterprise mobility solution development lies not just in developing the app, but also ensuring a smooth and efficient distribution system. The developer can hardly afford to rest on her laurels, having overcome all the challenges they faced during the development phase. They still need to manage application stores, manage integrated device management, and brace themselves for the never ending update cycles.
If your enterprise requires mobility solutions, as most enterprises nowadays do, a competent partner who knows their stuff makes life easy, and will improve the worth of your mobility solutions manifold. Get in touch with us for everything related to enterprise mobility solutions.
Guess what the global population is today! It’s 7 billion and is ticking faster than the stopwatch needle. Out of this, there are more than 2.7 billion smartphone subscriptions worldwide and the figure is expected to touch 6.1 billion in 2020, surpassing the number of active fixed line connections, according to the Ericsson mobility report. By the end of 2020, 80% of the global data traffic will be from smartphones. That’s how fast people are getting the mobile mind shift.
Enterprise mobile apps: does it make sense for your business?
“Sometimes the best way to simplify complex business processes and make employees’ jobs easier is with homegrown enterprise mobile applications.”
The increased global demand in mobiles, tablets and other smart devices in the past few years have led to millions of mobile apps. The ripple effect is not just limited to the common consumers, but is also among the technology giants and SMBs, who consider that having a mobile ready team is vital for the modern work environment. 61% of companies have plans to make mobility their top priority in 2016 and will spend more on software, devices and services to accomplish this. Why? Simply because studies prove that mobile application users complete 1.5 times as much work on their smart device, that too with a 40% operational efficiency every year. Both custom mobile applications and off-the shelf business applications are getting popular among companies. Businesses are found to allow six off-the-shelf apps and five custom mobile business apps for employees on an average.
This being the status, enterprise mobile applications for businesses is not a choice anymore, rather it’s a necessity to stay relevant and in the picture. Apart from the above benefits, here are few compelling reasons why your business should start investing in enterprise mobile application development now:
Increased productivity
Enterprise Mobile apps make it convenient for workers to work. The use of enterprise mobile applications in companies are thus getting huge to collect, utilize, share and learn from their enormous amount of data. Industries (for instance, the field service industry) have been seen to embrace mobility exclusively moving from paperwork to the cloud. It has helped them simplify travel and communication, improve processes and reduce human errors. Companies have realized substantial productivity gains, improved sales, better tracking of work and least sway-offs from set goals, using efficient mobile apps. Businesses are thus going to extremes to encourage mobile application development and its adoption to make employee’s important tasks much simpler, flexible, faster and accessible on the go. It helps reduce the need for them to travel, and trims the time taken to complete tasks.
Employers are gradually shifting employees from using desktops to smart devices, because they know the workers will find it easier, faster and helps them to be in loop wherever they are. And this will in turn keep them indulged, and make them productive!
Better ROI from enterprise mobile apps
Organizations save huge amounts converting their manual processes into apps. Mobile applications encourage employee collaboration and facilitate sharing of the best practices across the teams. This helps create a holistic environment that will benefit the employer, employees and the customers. This in turn increases the ROI on a good enterprise mobile application development. . Out of those who have tracked their cost saving from switching to mobile app, 17% saved around $25,000-$100,000 annually and 81% around $1,000-$25,000.
Developing in-house enterprise applications lessens the security and risk concerns
Apps available from the stores might be too detrimental to the security. Certain apps don’t even encrypt the data they transmit/ receive through the network, and thus is prone to interceptions. Employees using such apps to store or exchange sensitive, confidential company data will be silently and unknowingly compromising the company’s security policies. Encouraging enterprise mobile app development in house is probably the right solution here.
Attracting the majority- the youngsters
The largest percentage of employees in companies is the youth, and is the most prominent users of smart devices. The generation rely more on mobile devices than on traditional PC computers. To make this vast audience satisfied and comfortable, enterprise mobility solutions is the way to go.
Greater customer engagement, service and support
Do you think you can benefit from the ability to reach out to your customers, irrespective of the place, 24*7? It’s just wow! Right? That is exactly why you will need Apps, to connect with your customers and employees anytime, anywhere.
Enterprise mobility is becoming an integral part of business. Businesses will start to own their own Enterprise App stores, and that could be the best thing to do for your company. At the same time, there are certain things that you should know before embarking on this plan so that you don’t set unrealistic goals. To ensure that enterprise app development is a strategic asset and not just another technology investment, you must align it with the company’s goals and policies. Contact our mobility experts to know more about these trends and policies, and to learn how an enterprise mobile app can change your business for the better.