The pace of mobilisation within many enterprises is increasing rapidly. Enterprises of all sizes and types are ‘going mobile’ to increase the productivity of their employees, bring added flexibility to the workforce and reduce costs — all of which help companies gain a competitive edge.

As part of their mobilisation efforts, enterprises of all types and sizes are providing a growing number of management and staff with mobile devices equipped to access corporate data and applications. In addition, enterprises are embarking on initiatives that will significantly increase their use of mobile applications and services. As mobile and wireless solutions become increasingly important to an organisation’s overall business strategy, they are also becoming increasingly important in an organisation's IT strategy.

Today, we examine some of the trends that are driving increased enterprise mobilisation, along with some of the management challenges these trends bring with them.

More corporate users of mobile devices at all levels of the enterprise
Not only are more company executives than ever before beginning to depend on their smart mobile devices, but staff at all levels are increasingly ‘going mobile’. Smartphone use is rapidly driving down into the ranks of middle management and staff workers. Some 67% of cios responding to a Coleman Parkes survey of top-500 companies reported that the number of non-managerial staff with access to advanced corporate mobile devices will increase, with fully one-third of them indicating that the number will increase significantly.

And in many cases, when the enterprise doesn’t supply mobile devices to employees, they are simply using their personal mobile devices to transact company business and run company applications, with or without the knowledge of the IT organisation. Though this trend increases the proportion of employees who have access to corporate information and applications when mobile, it also presents new security threats for the IT organisation to manage.

More powerful and less expensive mobile devices
Mobile handsets are becoming more powerful with each new release, to the point where the newest and smartest mobile devices are more like handheld computers than mobile phones. With every product release, mobile devices have more capabilities and cost less.

Network providers have made their pricing models more attractive to enterprises as well. Rather than per-minute, per-transaction or per-byte pricing for mobile data, which is difficult to budget for and therefore very unattractive to enterprises, data services are being offered in attractive pricing bundles, including ‘all-you-can-eat’ packages.

With this sort of power in such a small and portable package, many executives and managers are finding their mobile handset to be as irreplaceable as any PC or laptop. Unlike PCs and laptops, however, mobile devices carry equally large amounts of information in a much smaller and more portable package that is incredibly easy to misplace, lose or steal, significantly increasing the risk of loss or theft to the enterprise.

A move towards more powerful, IP-based network infrastructures
Wide area networks are continually being enhanced to deliver the bandwidth necessary to support new data-heavy mobile services and applications. These enhanced networks offer improved breadth of coverage and reliability — key objectives for most mobile operators. 4G networks such as WiMAX are now being rolled out, enabling ever more sophisticated, data-heavy mobile services and applications. Long Term Evolution (LTE) is shortly to follow.

In addition, many high-end mobile devices are multimode — they can connect to a WAN or use a Wi-Fi connection, when available, for high-bandwidth, data-heavy activities. This trend makes it possible to seamlessly mobilise sophisticated enterprise applications, but it also increases the security threats represented by hackers, viruses and other malware.

More advanced and data-heavy mobile applications and services
Over the past several years many industries have come to rely on mobile enterprise applications. Mobile e-mail and calendar access have become necessary tools for management who need always-on access to the same information they would have available in the office. There is a more general trend to mobilise more corporate e-mail systems as well as other enterprise applications. Popular mobile enterprise applications used across all industries include sales force automation, field force automation, fleet management, inventory management and wireless CRM.

Employee mobile devices often contain a wide range of applications and data files, both company-issued and personal. However, according to the Coleman Parkes survey, 63% of cios interviewed do not actively monitor the types of data that employees are storing on their devices. Nothing prevents employees from installing data and applications onto their devices that could cause problems for the company — from unknowingly circulating viruses to not interacting well with other corporate systems or not adhering to corporate security policies and compliance requirements.

In summary
The proliferation of devices that can access enterprise applications and data, from just about anywhere, over a wide variety of network connections is creating both great opportunities and significant challenges for IT departments. Not only do companies need to minimise the risk associated with the possible loss, theft or misuse of a growing population of sophisticated devices, but they also need to find technologies to manage everything from company-issued mobile devices to a host of different personal and partly personal mobile devices. Management systems built for one particular type of device or on the assumption of one particular network connection simply won’t work in this situation — enterprises need to implement management systems that can handle a diverse range of different devices, settings, applications and services, regardless of where they are or how they are connected.

As enterprises mobilise, IT organisations are finding that they have an urgent need to be able to manage, secure and support mobile devices in much the same way they manage the PCs and laptops that are connected to their fixed network today. Effective, over-the-air management of a company’s mobile devices, data and applications will mean faster mobilisation of enterprise applications, which, in turn, will lead to increased employee productivity at all levels of the enterprise. Recognition of the trends driving mobile adoption and the unique challenges associated with managing mobile devices is a good first step in ensuring that corporate data is protected and the business is kept safe while it progresses with mobilisation initiatives. Taking the next step — building policies, processes and systems to meet the unique needs of managing mobile devices, data and applications — will enable enterprises to accelerate the pace of their mobilisation efforts, bringing the benefits of a truly ‘borderless office’ one step closer to reality.