Companies like yours are doing everything they can to take advantage of mobility right now. If you’re like most, you are enabling employees to use their personal devices for remote work.

You’ve created security and compliance guidelines that are now in place across your organization. You’ve possibly even considered and/or have implemented a mobile device management (MDM) solution to help your IT teams extend their management capabilities to many of these new endpoints. So what do you need to do next?

A good place to focus is on the apps that you’re delivering to all these various devices and locations. First and foremost, mobility is about a lot more than simply supporting email and browsers. It’s about giving users the ability to do their jobs from anywhere—and giving them seamless, secure access to the apps and data they use every day. That’s means deploying enterprise-grade apps—like Microsoft Office, essential legacy desktop apps, and the latest SaaS and Web apps—and ensuring a user experience just like they can get while sitting at a desk at headquarters.
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To that end, here are seven best-practice considerations for deploying mission-critical apps to mobile users:

1. Start with a strategy
Before you implement anything, make sure you have a clear strategy in place.

2. Use third-party mobile apps
Sometimes, the easiest and most efficient solution is to let someone else create the app.

3. Porting applications
Many times, this is IT’s first consideration. But as many have already found out, this can have significant, unintended consequences due to how these legacy applications were initially developed.

4. Develop native apps
If you have ample development staff (along with time and budget), creating native versions of apps can be an ideal solution.
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5. Adopting mobile web apps
For an organization with several different mobile platforms in use, developing a web-based application that runs on a website geared to mobile devices can have multiple benefits.

6. Build using HTML 5
HTML 5 delivers many cross-platform advantages of web development with some platform-specific advantages of native apps.

7. Take advantage of virtual desktops and apps
One of the fastest, easiest ways to provide mobile access to vital apps, regardless of their operating system, is virtually.

Taking full advantage of mobility is an ongoing process. Every organization has various needs, challenges, options and considerations that need to be properly assessed before any decision is made. And while each mobile deployment option has its advantages and weaknesses, you have to find the option(s) that work best for your environment and your users.

To learn more about these important considerations, download this informative white paper, 7 best practices to securely deploy enterprise-grade apps to mobile users. And ask us how we can help with your next deployment!