Is your business network available on any device? With the increased focus on mobile marketing and business on the go, you should make sure to take the extra steps needed to optimize your network for access on smartphones, tablets, and other mobile devices. This can be as simple as revamping your company's website or as complex as overhauling the way you handle your network security. For some tips about moving to a mobile world, read on.
First of all, it is essential to define the difference between mobile access and mobile networking. Providing mobile access is a matter of making your website mobile-friendly. This means optimizing your business's public site, removing frames that can be cumbersome on mobile devices, and streamlining your overall graphical presentation. By comparison, mobile networking means optimizing your entire business network so your employees, consultants, and other VIPs can easily access their essential files through their mobile devices. This is a much more involved process and requires a comprehensive look at your network. It can cause some security issues, but it can also streamline your business.
Whether you plan on allowing mobile networking as part of your business, you should plan on optimizing your website for mobile access from the public. The key tenet in handling this optimization is to use as simple and streamlined an interface as possible. Avoid frames and long menus, and use simple buttons and easy to find links in order to help your customers navigate. Image and video is essential when designing a site for mobile users. The use of pictures and visual media helps draw a customer's eye and makes the visitor feel engaged throughout their time on the site. There are mobile tools that can convert your site, but it is usually best to have your web designer take a hands-on approach.
When approaching mobile networking, you can follow the same general principles of wireless networking. This means that you have to make sure that you either issue identical mobile devices for all employees on a particular team or establish a manner in which each employee can register their own devices for work use. It also means that you need to pay attention to the various security issues that may arise as a result of the trade off for convenience. If you have an employee Intranet, you need to use the same general optimization and design guidelines that your public site uses. Remember that a mobile network will only be effective if everybody is on the same page and can read it.
When setting up a mobile network, you open yourself up to many potential security breaches. For example, most mobile devices lack the level of password security and virus protection that Windows PCs and Macs possess. When malware does infect a mobile device, there are generally fewer removal options. A mobile network will require that you rely on company policy when enforcing good password security and will require that you spend extra time each month in order to monitor both your firewall and your network files in order to ensure that there are no infections. Some people claim that the risk is a small price to pay for ease of access, but only you or a system admin can serve as the ultimate authority.
One of the benefits of designing a mobile network is planning for when your business grows. Rather than having to worry about reconfiguring a number of different office computers and company access points, it is a much simpler matter to build the technology around your business needs rather than your personnel. By adding a few extra access points and some mobile devices for employees to use, you can reconfigure the on-site layout in virtually any way you need. When it comes to public mobile access, you can follow this general philosophy, simply adding buttons or images to your front page as your site expands. Whether expanding a site or a network, just focus on your business needs first.
Adding mobile devices to your business plan is generally a simple matter of making everything more accessible. Making your site more accessible for public mobile access just means thinking visually and simplifying whenever possible. An entire mobile network overhaul isn't much different in terms of basic philosophy, except that you need to consider some essential security questions while remembering to build for the now, since expanding in the future will be so easy.