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Enterprise Mobility–The Buzz Word for Some?

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V&D Bureau
New Update

Keeping in mind the rising use of mobile devices and applications in the enterprise, one of the top IT trends of 2014 is believed to be the adoption of enterprise mobility by businesses and enterprises in India.

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Enterprise mobility will in turn drive further trends in data security especially around mobile data security and mobile device management (MDM). It will also impact the way cloud services are leveraged by the enterprises to host and manage mobile data.While the sale of mobile devices con-tinued to see tremendous growth over the last few years, the use of mobile apps also saw a corresponding leap over the same period.

According to some latest estimates, The App Store and Google Play (formerly known as Android Market) have over 800,000 apps a piece with BlackBerry App World having approximately 120,000 apps.

However, most of the mobile apps available and in use today are for personal use and not too many enterprises have taken enterprise mobility as a significant area of focus and growth. It is believed that it is about to change. To understand why that may be, let's look at how mobile apps have evolved over the last few years.

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Rise of the Apps

Mobile apps were initially offered for general productivity and information retrieval and were relatively simple-for example applications for email, calendar, notes, stock market, weather information, etc. Most of these apps did not require extensive processing capability and the use of smartphones.

The increase of mobile processing power and the advent

of smartphones coupled with the availability of developer tools have driven rapid expansion into other categories such as, social media, geo location-based services like mapping, tracking, and surveys, health and fitness apps, and mobile commerce including banking and ticket sales/purchases.

The popularity of mobile apps has continued to rise, as their usage has become increasingly prevalent across mobile phone users. A May 2012 comScore study reported that during the previous quarter, more mobile subscribers used apps than browsed the web on their devices: 51.1% vs 49.8%, respectively.

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A direct effect of this pervasive use of personal mobile apps will be the relative ease of adoption of mobile apps in the enterprise. Whereas adoption of traditional IT and applications was seen as a hurdle by business users, there is no such perceived hurdle in the adoption

of mobile applications as users are already using mobile applications in their personal space.

Areas of Concern

Some remain for the enterprise CIO in the adoption of enterprise mobility in a big way. These areas have to do with issues surrounding mobile device management and mobile data security.

While being large enough in their own right, their problems have only been compounded by the introduction of BYOD policies. Mobile and cloud security will therefore be areas of significant focus in the enterprise as the adoption of both has been rapid in the recent years creating vulnerabilities of a new kind for enterprise data and challenges of a different scale for enterprise IT.

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While mobile security a few years ago was limited to protection of personal data, the rapid adoption of enterprise mobility, mobile applications, and BYOD in the work place has made mobile device usage one of the most vulnerable areas for enterprise data, and mobile security perhaps one of the most important areas for enterprise IT.

Applications and infrastructure hosted on the cloud, with enormous amounts of data, coupled with unprotected and unregulated mobile devices accessing this cloud-based environment from outside the corporate firewall make for the ‘perfect storm' when it comes to data security.

IT departments are therefore focusing on the use of specific applications and tools to manage mobile devices in their environment, and monitor the effective implementation of the policies governing their use.

Conclusion

With the rapid and extensive adoption of smartphones and tablets, enterprises are looking at mobility across the workforce, to boost productivity and to allow them real-time access to data without physical limitations. The enterprise is becoming more aware, more agile, more mobile and more responsive to customer sentiment and demand-all this while looking to control costs through the use of optimal solutions, rather than the ‘one size fits all' approach of the past.

These solutions are not necessarily out-of-the-box or off the shelf. Businesses are looking for customized solutions that serve their very specific enterprise application needs when it comes to mobility data and analytics.

The top IT trends of 2014 will therefore mirror these larger trends in the enterprise as businesses look to embrace enterprise mobility seriously.

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