By: Chris Badger, Director of Business Development for Enterprise, YouSendIt
Companies are now realizing how important mobile devices have become to increase productivity. Companies like SAP and Genentech are seeing great productivity increases using mobile apps for their employees as they indicated at last week’s AppNation conference. The prevailing view at this conference is that user experience and ad-hoc cloud solutions are a bigger priority over IT’s desire for security. Companies will embrace this Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) trend and as a result a new breed of enterprise application Mobile Device Management (MDM) vendors like MobileIron will address IT’s need for improved management and security of these devices and apps.
There are many reasons why companies will adopt a formal BYOD policy:
- The company does not have to pay for these devices
- Users are happier selecting their own device and take care of that device which lowers helpdesk costs
- IT does not need to research what their employees would like: usability and the user experience can drive what enterprise mobile apps get deployed
Because employees have a mix of their personal and business data on their devices, IT has been challenged controlling the right data on mobile devices. IT needs new policies and approaches to control only the corporate data. The extra layer of difficulty is IT must enable extranet collaboration and not just control internal flow of info and documents. Do not fret, there are many enterprises doing small experiments and rapid prototyping on how to bring value to their users while also addressing the IT security concerns. With big enterprises like SAP and Genentech readily adopting mobile devices and the new breed of enterprise ready mobile apps, BYOD is both smart business and inevitable.
