Role Of Mobile Application Management (MAM) In App Development Field

IT services and application development are two distinct terms. Both fields are interrelated in many forms and both fields are ruling the businesses for many years. Mobile app developers design applications, IT services use and manage those applications for different types of operations. Mobile applications are the only things that holds IT services and application development together.

Now, the mobile devices and applications are taking over the IT industry. This has made Mobile Device Management (MDM) a vital thing. The mobile data security is the top priority of MDM. It deals with securing, monitoring and integrating the mobile devices, tablets and laptops. MDM optimizes the functionality of smartphones within the enterprise and at the same time protect the corporate network.

Situations have changed over the past decade due to the rise of cloud computing. IT industry now want API knowledge to grab information about how Enterprise Mobility Management (EMM) actually works.

Role Of DevOps In MDM

The automation is necessary to manage and monitor composite infrastructure of the cloud. This infrastructure largely depends on the coding skills of top mobile app developers. For the management of small elements in the mobile app, IT professionals need access to application's source code. The emergence of Agile development methods and their quick release cycles has increased the teamwork between the application developers and IT administrators.

Unfortunately, most of the IT admins face difficulty to adapt the cooperation with the application developers. Hence the automated management tools like DevOps is provided for both application developers and IT admins. DevOps helps IT admins to easily understand the mobile app development. It generally emphasize on communication between developers and IT professionals. DevOps infrastructure provides working environment where designing, coding and testing of application is done reliably and rapidly.

Cloud computing is also accepted in the enterprise mobile applications. But mobility of application is still the fairly new concept. App developers need the prospect of learning new skills and developing new strategies to implement new technologies and features in mobile applications.

Mobile Application Management (MAM)

IT should know about mobile application development tools by itself. MDM is the fundamental element of EMM. MDM act accordingly with old mindset of IT industry. It gives IT professionals full control over a mobile app like they had it over desktops. With an agent app and management console, administrators can control the entire system.

But, EMM has an advanced tool- Mobile Application Management (MAM). The MAM follows forward-thinking approach. Though it is a little bit difficult to implement, it is come up with great features.

MAM gives IT control over the specific application rather than the whole device. Admins can wipe, update and apply various policies to the application. The main tactic is that using MAM, an IT unit could control, secure lock down their specific corporate applications only. Other than this, everything else on the device is under the control of the user. This makes MAM more valid solution to the problem of user privacy and IT security.

For example, a company can use MAM tool in order to deliver secure email, contact and expense report application to iPhone. If users wanted to use a smartphone to play the game, they do not need to provide the password to open the gaming app. But if a user wants to open expense report application, users need to provide the password in order to access that application.

Implementation Of MAM

Almost every user downloads mobile applications from an official application store (Apple’s App Store, Android’s Play Store). The main problem to implement MAM is the structure of application stores. It makes difficult for the MAM service providers to get in between the user device and application.

MAM needs access to the source code of every application it manages. Unlike MDM, MAM also requires an agent app installed on a device. For the commercial applications like file sync-sharing, the independent software functions directly with MAM to provide access to the source code of the application.

The process of developing MAM-based application requires crucial coordination between the IT and development teams. It is not necessary for IT admins to know how to do the coding. But they should explain their requirements and goal to the developers using APIs and Software Development Kits (SDKs).

Built-in MAM APIs are provided by some mobile app development companies. For example, Apple provides Managed Open API to provide IT control over how iOS application interaction and data sharing. Some MAM service providers also offer SDKs, which are libraries of prewritten code. Best app developers can add these libraries to their apps to enforce and secure various policies on the app.