Introduction
To keep pace with the expeditiously evolving digital world, organizations are leveraging technological devices to enhance work processes, data accessibility, and employee flexibility. By integrating technology into several aspects of a company’s operations, enterprise mobility enables employees to work from anywhere and use various devices for multiple tasks. Now, the question is, how is a data center related to this enterprise approach?
To answer that, we can find data centers playing an instrumental role in maintaining enterprise mobility, from offering a centralized data storage location to providing access to applications and resources for employees.
With The CEO Views, we can have a better look at the critical role of a data center in driving enterprise mobility. As a business, entrepreneurial, and technology magazine, The CEO Views shares valuable insights on various enterprise approaches and applications and the role of technology in supporting them.
This article from our platform focuses on the unprecedented role of data centers in ensuring enterprise mobility.
Uncovering Enterprise Mobility and Its Importance
On a basic level, according to McKinsey Quarterly, “enterprise mobility is the deployment of mobile devices of all kinds such as smartphones and tablets as well as related IT staff and infrastructure, network, and applications by a company.” It generally fulfills the purposes of:
- Enhancing the company’s engagement with its end customer
- Improving the productivity of employees
- Driving productivity in the company’s internal business processes
Enterprise mobility enables business employees instant access to sensitive personal and work-related data through mobile applications. Since the introduction of the first iPhone in 2007, a dramatic shift in the work process has been witnessed. For a business to run uninterruptedly, it must inevitably invest in enterprise mobility to make applications accessible through mobile devices.
Driving Force Behind the Spurred Enterprise Mobility
While the ubiquity of smart phones and the rapid adoption of tablets are major factors behind the recent surge in enterprise mobility, there are multiple factors spurring this approach. Some of the primary drivers include: the deployment of 4G network to enable videos and remote access into corporate networks, the consumerization of IT, secured development of mobile devices, and a macro trend towards jobless recovery.
Importance of Enterprise Mobility
Timely access to information is crucial for the efficient operations of a business, and enterprise mobility ensures that. By enabling precise accessibility to information through mobile whenever required, this mobility approach enhances employee productivity through immediate communication. It can also provide significant customer information at the point of sale. Henceforth, increasing employee ability to respond to clients’ needs swiftly and efficiently.
Enterprise mobility can evade the expense of buying laptops for all off-site marketing and sales teams, enabling them to update consumer info on the go and access required information without expensive equipment. Apart from that, it can increase business efficiency by bringing information to employees’ fingertips and ensuring smoother workflow through synchronized cloud-hosted applications.
What is a Data Center?
A data center stores and shares data and applications for organizations. It comprises components of storage systems, routers, switches, firewalls, servers, and application delivery controllers. In its simplest form, a data center is a physical facility that enterprises use to house their critical applications and data. Based on a network of computing and storage resources, its design enables the delivery of shared data and applications.
Unlike traditional data centers, modern data centers vary in terms of infrastructure. A modern data center has transitioned from on-premises physical servers to virtual networks that support applications and workloads in a multi-cloud environment.
How a Data Center Influences Enterprise Mobility?
In the era of enterprise IT, data centers are crafted to support business activities and applications such as email and file sharing, customer relationship management (CRM), productivity applications, enterprise resource planning (ERP), big data, AI, ML, communication and collaboration services, and virtual desktops.
With an efficient data center for enterprise, one can reduce barriers to internal operations that affect customer service. Data centers introduce innovative ways to manage and store data that encourage enterprises to branch out into the utilization of cloud computing as a part of enterprise mobility.
Serving as a single source of truth for employees accessing data from their mobile devices, a data center acts as a repository for all business-critical information. Data centers drive enterprise mobility by supporting the security, scalability, and availability required for modern mobile workflows, allowing organizations to leverage mobility solutions effectively.
A data center also hosts applications on behalf of enterprises to ensure operational mobility. These centers unlock enterprise mobility and improve workflow significantly by hosting applications like CRM, ERP, productivity tools, and more. Data centers can also provide necessary security and control features to align data protection with industry regulations.
Conclusion
When it comes to the question of data centers playing a crucial role in enterprise mobility, the role trajectory extends beyond just hosting applications and storing and managing data. A data center also delivers secure connections between mobile devices and the enterprise infrastructure, ensuring data privacy and integrity. Enterprise mobility is also ensured through flexibility offered by a data center to help enterprises scale infrastructure in a top-down method. Last but not least, by consolidating IT resources in a data center, enterprises can reduce costs associated with software, maintenance, and hardware.
