Driving fast into the Tech Lane

As I was driving down to a restaurant with a friend of mine, we were chatting about another common friend and his new venture on mobile applications. The conversation soon gained technical flavor and it was a nice drive into the fast changing technology lane. Here are some excerpts from our conversation during the drive.

On why enterprises are in a hurry to port existing applications to mobile platform...

The technology is evolving so fast and enterprises will soon be embracing mobile devices which range from smart phones to tablets. Every tech worker owns a mobile smart device of his or her choice. Most such workers are holding senior positions in the enterprise and are very keen to use it to perform their work and for the purpose, try to influence the IT heads to allow such devices in work environment. This in fact is a challenge for the CIOs in terms of information security and confidentiality. But as this trend is growing, the IT heads have no option than to embrace this trend and start regulating this with a formal BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) policy, controls and governance framework around it.

On how BYOD is relevant in the context of mobile applications...

Yes, as the BYOD is gaining increased acceptance, the next big challenge is to get existing applications working on such devices, so that the employees don’t have to be provided with a desktop or even laptop. This in turn drives the need for porting the applications to mobile platform. Many tools and methodologies are emerging in this space so as to facilitate building mobile applications from ground up and also to port existing legacy applications to mobile platform. Write once deploy any where is the USP for today’s development tool vendors.

On how legacy applications can be ported...

This is where the Service Orientation is gaining importance. Business services are identified and exposed as reusable services and then build a portal application on top of it to appropriately present it for end user access on a variety of devices. The organizations would also consider embracing the cloud based SaaS applications to replace the legacy applications. And yes, migration to cloud could be a daunting task but CIOs are seeing a longer term benefit in doing so. An alternative shorter term solution could be to get a virtual desktop on the mobile device and then work on whatever legacy app that runs on the desktop.

About the concerns on cloud...

Yes, there still are certain concerns that keep organizations away from the cloud. However this trend is changing. Most organizations have already moved less critical applications to the public cloud. Like we have central / reserve banks regulating the banking industry, it is time for the industry consortium to come up with an independent regulatory body / framework, which can help establish the trust amongst the enterprises, which in turn will ease some of the security concerns. While industries like Banks and healthcare providers have reasons to be concerned to embrace cloud, other industries are showing serious signs of embracing the cloud.

On the amount of data that banks process and manage and whether that could be a deterrent for cloud adoption...

Be it cloud or not, data quality and data maintenance is going to emerge as a critical function. Dirty data and redundant data is being identified as having considerable impact on the profits of the organization. Tools have emerged in assuring data quality, data de-duplication and master data management. Computing hardware and related technologies like virtualization has made vertical and horizontal scaling very easy and thereby making the usage of these data intensive tools a possibility.

We both enjoyed this conversation and I am sure, you would also enjoy reading this. 

BYOD – Yet another challenge for IT heads

For those, who are not familiar with the term BYOD, it stands for “Bring Your Own Device” and use it to achieve your work goals, be it within the company or anywhere else. A simple example for this is when an employee uses his own iPad to access his corporate emails, or use any other wi-fi enabled device to connect to corporate wi-fi network and use it to perform certain work related tasks. This has been in practice with the education and training companies, where the students / participants are expected to use their own devices, subject to meeting of the required minimal hardware and software specifications. Thanks to the last recession the recent explosion of the smart personal gadgets, companies are increasingly considering allowing this. 

The factors that drive the BYOD amongst corporate are:

1.  Increased Productivity - Employees are expected to be happy working on their favourite stuff and in turn that is likely to bring in increased productivity.
2. Better Mobility – Organizations with mobile workforce, who typically work on the move, feel that BYOD could offer better mobility and flexibility.
3. Cost Savings – Though this may not be a real benefit, as organizations may end up spending considerably on mitigating the risks that BYOD brings on board, this is considered as a factor driving the increased adoption.
4. Influence from senior executives – Typically if a senior executive buys a latest gadget and then using it in the workplace to do their work.
5. Decreasing client installs – With increased adoption of Cloud based applications, all that a user need to access the enterprise application is a compatible web browser and this favours BYOD.

Certainly BYOD brings on board a lot of challenges to the IT department and here are some of the key challenges:

1. Support – The IT department have to start supporting varying make and models of smart gadgets running different operating systems and web browsers. Unless the IT department comes up with the list of gadgets that they can support, it could soon be a nightmare.
2. Licensing – If there are certain third party components to be installed on the smart devices, then it is better to have the licensing terms of the component vendor verified, as some vendors may impose restrictions in installing such components on devices other than those owned by the organization.
3. Network and Application Security – When employees use the organization provided devices, they are appropriately hardened in line with the security policies of the organization. But in case of BYOD, the employees for sure would not like to have their devices hardened for work use, instead they would like to be the administrators of their own device and play with it in whatever way they want. On the other hand, employees may even go ahead and install more and more mobile apps of their choice, some of which could even be malware.
4. Data Security – Whatever data that is cached or stored on the gadgets, as the devices are used for work are subject to be easily compromised.

For sure, this is yet another challenge that the IT managers should be ready to face soon, if not now.