Enterprise smartphone and tablet incursion to grow in 2012

Network World - Employees bringing their own devices to work was one of the biggest challenges IT departments faced in 2011, and in 2010, and in 2009 as well. And guess what? It's going to be one of the biggest challenges in 2012 too.

And now that the Kindle Fire has made Android tablets more popular, IT departments can only expect to see a wider array of new devices coming to work in the coming months. Forrester Research analyst Christian Kane says this wide variety of new devices is leading some companies to rethink how they manage mobility in the enterprise by managing access instead of devices.

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"In general, there's a concept right now that you should start managing the user rather than managing the device," he says. "So you should understand that workers can use one type of device at home and another type at work but you'll still give them access to the applications they need."

What this means for users, says Kane, is that the company will let them bring any device they want to work but it won't take responsibility for repairing that device if it gets broken or replacing it if it gets lost. Rather, the job of the enterprise will be to provision access to certain applications that the user needs on their phone and to ensure that enterprise applications are effectively walled off from whatever other applications that users may download onto their own devices.

"Apps need to be controlled and monitored because they're the single biggest source for malware and security breaches," says Dan Croft, the CEO of wireless administrative services provider Mission Critical Wireless. "I know there are all kinds of cool apps that people want to download. But once you download an app to a tablet you need to be confident that the app isn't going to be conducting activities that could hurt the company."

There are a few ways that companies can get a handle on this, both of which will require some investment. The first way is for companies to build up their own private clouds to exclusively handle data used by enterprise apps. SAP CIO Oliver Bussmann says that private clouds will give companies the ability to effectively segregate sensitive data while still ensuring that workers have easy access to it on their mobile devices.

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"A lot of companies are grappling with how to provide access to sharing for documents across all mobile and desktop platforms because there's a challenge right now if everything can be moved to a public cloud," he says. "So you need to find a solution that provides that kind of functionality in your own private cloud. With mobile device management software, for instance, we now have the opportunity to block users from putting documents onto iCloud or other public clouds."