It’s an exciting time for IT departments at enterprises in India today. The strides taken by enterprise technology have never been this exciting and challenging, at the same time, this transformation has completely overhauled the way enterprises function today. Enterprise mobility (EM) could be the most popular as well as most problematic solution, among others, for IT departments in recent times.
Spurred by the Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) trend, EM grew by leaps and bounds over the last three years. Employees prefer to work on their own devices as it is perceived to be better than the company-issued devices, owing to inclination and comfort of use. Personal and professional lifestyles are blending today with smartphones and tablets infiltrating corporate India. Employees no longer want IT to lay down restrictions on how they access data or work. They want access to their personal data at work, and their work at home.
It has been observed that trends such as BYOD are driven by end users rather than being enforced by companies as strict policies. According to the New Way of Work Life Survey commissioned this year by VMware, 81% of the respondents in enterprises bring their own devices to work. This is despite the fact that 85% are being provided with a portable device from their employer. This has only compounded the problems for IT departments. The BYOD phenomenon has brought with it complexity in managing a wide variety of devices in terms of both cost and security. It has also brought increased risk in securing and managing employee-owned devices, especially if they contain confidential information. In addition, to the increasing diversity of devices, there is increasing diversity in applications users consume as well SaaS, mobile applications, etc. The solution to this new paradigm is to allow IT to manage users rather than devices.
The three major trends are forcing IT to evolve new device platforms, new applications and new user expectations. IT organizations are increasingly challenged to support a dispersed, mobile workforce that demands instant, user-friendly services for accessing data and applications from a wide range of devices.
Information fragmentation is an overlooked issue that crops up with the diversity of devices and platforms. Devices and platforms hold information in different formats and very often, it is impossible to provide a consistent user experience as far as information is considered. There are a few solutions in existence that are designed to solve this and other challenges such as security and governance that BYOD brings to enterprise IT.
For example, one of the solutions connects end users to their data, applications, and desktops on any device while maintaining a consistent view across devices and still providing the required security and control. By transforming technology silos into centralized services, IT can improve operational efficiency, security, and agility through policy-based management across the organization.
The challenge is in striking the right balance between maintaining security and control for IT, while preserving the user-experience of the device for the employee. It is not an impossible task, as the companies that have happy, productive, efficient employees using their own devices would claim, but it is also not a plug-and-play solution that can just be switched on one day.
A company’s move to allow BYOD policies needs to be a well thought through evolution in the company’s IT infrastructure and virtualization journey.
BS Nagarajan is Director of Systems Engineering, India & SAARC, VMware.