Enterprise Mobility Management: Microsoft

Announced earlier this year, Microsoft’s Enterprise Mobility Suite (EMS) is the culmination of its efforts to extend the reach of Active Directory, System Center Configuration Manager and counterparts to provide mobile device and mobile application management. Comprehensive policy-based management with Azure Rights Management and Azure Active Directory help take care of identity and security, and integrate with your existing on-premise Microsoft technologies.

For the most part, you get what you’d expect – robust, easy to use administration from a central console, which removes the headache of managing mobile devices and mobile applications. Identity federation and single sign-on give users hassle-free access to applications and systems, regardless of location or device.

The most exciting part of the EMS is not actually new. Launched in 2010 as a rebrand of the old .NET Services product, the Azure AppFabric middleware functionality is designed to support customers with existing business applications, spanning different platforms, vendors and technologies, in delivering those to the cloud.

It provides a Software Developer’s Kit (SDK) that simplifies the process of exposing on-premise services to the cloud, protecting existing investment in applications but still supporting organisational evolution and agility to gain the advantages of mobility.

By ‘wrapping’ applications, you can rapidly deploy them through the cloud, all with built-in security and application management.

This solution is right for organisations that are…

Microsoft’s EMS solution is right for organisations that are:

• Already invested in Microsoft technologies, with some in-house expertise
• Need to securely manage a broad user base, with policy-based control and strong identity management
• Looking to expose more legacy applications and data sets to gain user productivity benefits, without undertaking large software development or redevelopment efforts.

Business outcomes

You will achieve business productivity gains for your users, based on their streamlined access to business systems and data from a range of devices, anywhere, while at the same time, you protect against enterprise security vulnerabilities from unmanaged devices and ad hoc security policies.

Microsoft’s EMS gives you policy-based access, delivering full control not only over what devices are used and what applications are accessed, but also the locations and times from which they are accessed, thus ensuring connections are made over secured, approved network connections and during designated hours.

Application wrapping with Azure middleware offers fast deployment of existing applications, with correspondingly fast time to return on investment.

Supporting the Enterprise Mobility pillars

Data^#3 and Microsoft

As a Gold Certified Partner and Microsoft’s largest partner in Australia, Data^#3 is ideally positioned to help you implement Microsoft’s Enterprise Mobility Suite across your enterprise.

A Data^#3 and Microsoft EMM engagement is suitable for Microsoft-centric organisations that already have systems and processes in place to manage users and devices and are required to extend those systems to cover mobile devices and the Anywhere Workplace, and want to rapidly deploy Microsoft EMM solutions.

For organisations without in-house development expertise, Data^#3’s consulting software development practice can help wrap and deploy legacy applications to the cloud.

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