Sanjay Deshmukh writes about the emergence of private enterprise app stores and new-age tablets
Widespread smartphone penetration in India coupled with strong convergence between mobile and Internet, provides enterprises a convenient medium for improving access to technology and mobility solutions to their customers, employees and contractors. As a result, mobility has become one of the key drivers for business transformation and growth and a topmost priority on the boardroom agenda. As we progress into future, there will be a need to redefine the purview of mobility from ‘being restricted to devices and the security’ to ‘a more overarching vision of enabling employees to work from anywhere and thus mobilising all the aspects of business.’ In this context of the new found imperatives of Indian organisations we anticipate the top technology trends in 2014.
Emergence of enterprise app store
Gartner predicts that by 2014, 60 per cent of corporate IT departments will deploy private enterprise app stores. Due to increasing penetration of mobile devices at workplace, the concept of an application store where a user can go for getting access to any application is becoming popular. This triggers organisations to set up app stores of their own, referred to as enterprise app store where an employee can go and get access to all the applications required to perform a business task. Enterprise app stores can allow IT to help mobilise the workforce by providing a policy-based distribution for enterprise apps, legacy apps, Windows apps, browser/HTMl 5 apps and native mobile apps and management of lifecycle of these apps. Going forward enterprises will focus on mobilising all apps, with the help of mobility solutions and delivering them to employees through an integrated enterprise app store.
let there be containers
Allowing employees to have access to enterprise apps and data anytime, anywhere, using any device is certainly a prerequisite for a comprehensive mobility policy. Today all the mobile devices and operating systems seamlessly allow users to share information and data across multiple apps. For ex: the users can take a picture and seamlessly post it on Facebook or Twitter in a single click of a button. This flexibility is in the DNA of these mobile platforms but if extended to corporate data and enterprise applications it will put many organisations at risk. Thus, security becomes the foremost challenge while adopting a mobility solution and it gets extremely difficult for enterprises to manage sensitive corporate data on personal devices, without gaining access to personal data residing on employee devices. To manage mobile apps and data on a user’s personal device, while simultaneously maintaining employee privacy, ‘containerisation of mobile apps’ is a technique that provides complete separation of corporate and personal data on a device.
Desktop virtualisation is here to stay
Customers today spend a large percentage of their IT budgets on IT infrastructure and hence they are looking at transformational IT infrastructure initiatives to optimise these spends. Desktop virtualisation is one technology which has seen rapid growth in adoption the last four years across industry segments. The primary reason behind this growth is that desktop virtualisation offers customers an opportunity to transform their IT infrastructure and increase employee productivity while improving the information security and optimising cost. In the year ahead, more organisations will transition to virtual desktop environment, replacing traditional desktop infrastructure.
Tablets, the new pill for enterprise users
With tablets’ purchases overtaking PC shipments, mobile devices are becoming the primary computing devices for many end users. These users are no more expecting basic common applications like secured email on these devices but they want the full functionality and access to all applications and data from these mobile devices and tablets. They want consistent user experience irrespective of whether they are using a company provided desktop/laptop or a tablet. This empowerment of user to get access to complete “work” which is all the apps, data and collaboration capability is required to leverage the power of this new computing device — the tablet.
Secure cloud storage
As more organisations adopt mobility solutions and employees increasingly start using mobile devices to access enterprise data from any locations, data management becomes a daunting task for IT. Users have increasingly turned to unsecure consumer-style cloud services for access to their data and files across all of their devices. Trends such as workshifting and Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) are putting more pressure on IT, which is struggling to reconcile these forces with the need to protect intellectual property and comply with regulatory requirements. To help IT regain control over employee file sharing, more organisations will implement an enterprise-class, IT-managed file sharing solution which offers IT the ability to control sensitive corporate data while meeting the mobility and collaboration needs of users.
Moving beyond MDM
While most mobility strategies started with mobile device management to address the device lifecycle needs of bring-your-own (BYO) or corporate-owned mobile devices, organisations are now expanding their plans to address mobile application lifecycle and mobile application performance. Today, users are demanding the freedom to choose their own device; to use any app on any device without having to remember all of their credentials; and to access all of their documents and emails wherever they are. Organisations need an end-to-end solution that addresses these user requirements while also meeting IT’s security and management requirements around the user, device, apps and data.
(The writer is vice president of India subcontinent, Citrix)