Indian Businesses Invest Heavily in Mobile Policy

An India-based media research firm and global mobile handset maker teamed up recently to survey the business mobile environment in India.

CyberMedia Research and BlackBerry found in their survey, "India Enterprise Mobility," that nearly three-fourths of businesses in the country identify mobile as being very important to their organizations. A total of 71 percent of respondents—407 IT head in a number of industries—said their businesses currently had a mobile policy or were in the process of creating one.

CMR Lead Analyst (Emerging Technologies) Apalak Ghosh spoke about the necessity for mobile in enterprises and the support it needs to exist.

"The era of mobile enterprise has arrived. An entire ecosystem needs to be developed to support enterprise mobility. Design, development, deployment, and maintenance of devices and applications will assume critical importance in this process," Ghosh said.

Zeenews.com provided more detailed information about the study. It showed the prominent reasons why IT decision makers said they needed to implement a mobile policy and the benefits of having such a policy in place. Overall, 76 percent of respondents said data security was the key requirement for their businesses needing to monitor mobile devices. Somewhat more generalized, 62 percent said control of devices was the main driver of mobile policy, and that notion could line up with Ghosh's sentiment about design, development, deployment, and maintenance because all those aspect of the mobile lifecycle could relate to device control.

Mobile policies helped businesses in various ways, the study found. Nearly 66 percent of respondents said mobile policies helped businesses collect data about employee mobile usage, and 56 percent showed that mobile plans helped reduce office paperwork and saved time as well as additional expenses as a result of electronic business methods.